It's Hard to Change Our Behaviors

But it's possible. I wrote about one success story and one perplexing national failure, around the two most important changes we'll need to make to stop eating the earth.

People keep asking me about the main takeaways of WE ARE EATING THE EARTH. (You’ve pre-ordered it, right? No? Click here this second!) I’m always happy to deliver my not-quite-as-simple-as-it-should-be elevator pitch, but I’ve noticed some people don’t really want to hear it. They just want to know the main takeaways for them, what they can do to reduce the eating of the earth. And that pitch is extremely simple:

You can eat less meat, especially beef. And you can waste less food.

The scientists at Project Drawdown ranked the 100 most effective climate solutions, not just food and climate solutions, and shifting toward plant-rich diets was #2. That’s mainly because three quarters of all agricultural land is used to raise livestock. And reducing food waste was #1. That’s mainly because wasting food also wastes the farmland, fertilizer, and other inputs used to grow that food; humanity now uses a land mass the size of China to grow garbage.

Unfortunately, making those simple changes is infuriatingly difficult. Global meat consumption keeps rising every year. The world still wastes at least one fourth of its food.

Good news first: I wrote about a hilariously simple strategy that New York City’s hospitals are using to nudge their patients to eat less meat. When they launched it two years ago, only about 1% of their hospital meals were plant-based; now it’s 51%, and their greenhouse gas emissions from food service have dropped 36 percent.

Please read my story in Canary Media, but here’s the spoiler: The strategy is to offer patients a plant-based meal as the default. If they say no, they’re offered another plant-based option. If they ask for meat, they get meat. But they usually don’t ask for meat.

It’s a little more complicated than that, because New York City (under the otherwise non-exemplary quasi-vegan Mayor Eric Adams) has made a real effort to make its plant-based offerings delicious and culturally relevant. But it’s not way more complicated than that, because human beings are suggestible and status-quo-biased. There’s a ton of behavioral science that suggests we’re more likely to invest in a 401(k), sign up to be organ donors, or do just about anything when it’s the default option.

Now for the bad news: Even though Americans are famously furious about high food prices, so furious they re-hired Donald Trump to run the country, they’re not wasting less food. We actually seem to be wasting a little more food.

I wrote about this phenomenon for Slate, and I reported some fun psychological speculation about why consumers get pissed about how much they’re paying at the grocery store but don’t seem to mind throwing away $1500 worth of groceries a year. But honestly, the behavioral scientists don’t seem to know what the hell is going on, except that, again, behavioral change is extremely hard. Which sucks, because changing individual behaviors, while not as important as changing policies and incentives, will be extremely important to fixing the climate and saving the planet.

And remember, as Project Drawdown said, the three most consequential things you can do to help fix the climate and save the planet are eat less meat, waste less food, and pre-order WE ARE EATING THE EARTH. That’s just science!