Planetary Eating: The Hidden Links between Your Plate and Our Cosmic Neighborhood

A scientifically rigorous guide to making the best dietary choices for both our personal health and our environmental footprint.

Many of us try our best to eat foods that are healthy and environmentally sustainable. But are we getting it right? Which foods amount to “wise” choices, and which ones are best avoided? Common views often range widely and are sometimes even contradictory. It’s most unfortunate when conscientious individuals who go to great lengths in their quest to minimize environmental impacts follow the wrong advice. In Planetary Eating, Gidon Eshel aims to minimize such misuse of good will by providing scientifically untrained readers with the tools needed to make the best choices for themselves and for our planet.

Eshel writes that dietary choices, and the corresponding agricultural patterns, are, for most of us, our principal form of planetary agency—the main ways by which we impact our overburdened and undernourished host planet. Agriculture and diet are therefore most productively examined through the planetary science perspective. Starting from rather basic (but not quite first) principles, Planetary Eating offers impartial, fact-based analysis with firm foundations in earth and planetary sciences on how to make the right dietary choices.

Gidon Eshel is Research Professor at Bard. He completed a postdoc at the Harvard Center for Planetary Physics, where he was a NOAA Global and Climate Change Fellow, and received a Radcliffe Fellowship in 2016. He has written tens of papers on the geophysics of food.