Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public

Health, where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's

leading health challenges.

If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to Public Health Question at jhhu.edu. That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes. Hi listeners, it's Lindsay Smith Rogers. Today, climate and agriculture. Michael Grenwald is a journalist and award-winning author with a

provocative new book entitled We Are Eating the Earth. He joins Dr. Josh Sharfstein to talk in his own

blunt style about the challenge of feeding the planet without wiping out the wetlands, forests,

and other carbon reservoirs that protect us from global warming.

Let's listen.

Mike Runwell, thank you so much for joining me today on Public Health on Call to talk about your book, We Are Eating the Earth.

This is not the usual book on climate change that is going to focus on energy.

This book is all about food and whether or not our way of making food is sustainable for our planet.

And it was fascinating to read because I thought initially that when people talk about climate, they're usually talking about energy.

They're talking about getting rid of fossil fuels. But you're talking about food. Why is that?

Well, thanks so much for having me, Josh. And honestly, I felt the same way. I was, as you know,

I was a reporter at the Washington Post at Time Magazine, at Politico magazine. And I wrote a lot

about energy and climate. And I realized I was spectacularly ignorant about the food part of the problem. But food is a third of the problem. And it's about 1% of the conversation and 3% of the money. So I'm hoping we can start to grapple with this stuff. So lay out the argument. If I'm very devoted to electrifying the economy, switching out of fossil fuels. How do you get my attention to say it might actually be what we're all eating that is a huge part of the problem we have to solve?

Well, it's true. Energy is still two-thirds of the problem, right? But the good news is at least we know what to do about energy. You know, you got to electrify the global economy and start using clean electricity to run it. And we are actually starting to do about energy. You know, you've got to electrify the global economy and start using

clean electricity to run it. And we are actually starting to do that a little bit. And if you're

building a power plant today, it's probably wind or solar. Food, on the other hand, you know,

we don't know what to do and the problem's getting worse. And the basic problem is that

we're eating the earth, right? I mean, yes,

we have diesel tractors and crop dusters have some carbon emissions. The burping cows have some methane

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