Yale Climate Connections: Exploring the Spiciest Perspectives on Climate Change and Food

Ahead of the holiday season, the Yale Climate Connections editorial team — Sara Peach, Pearl Marvell, and Sam Harrington — sat down to talk about food, climate change, underspiced turkeys, the Uncanny Valley of meat substitutes, pro-mushroom sentiment, and much more.  

This discussion has been edited and condensed.

Sam: Going into the holidays, we are thinking about food. Food is good. We like food. But according to the U.N., a third of climate pollution is food-related. A lot of that comes from agriculture and related land-use emissions. But also there is the climate cost of food waste and the emissions that come from the processes that we use to dispose of food in landfills and incinerating trash. Some of the most powerful individual actions people can take are food-related. But also, we live in a culture and society where moralizing food choices can be quite dangerous. So I think there’s a lot for us to talk about here.

Let’s start with: When did you start thinking about food and its relationship to climate change and how did that make you feel? What did that mean for your life?

Sara: I switched over to being a vegetarian in college around the time when I was getting really concerned about environmental issues. I was mostly vegetarian for decades but recently had to stop for medical reasons, and that has been a real shock. I still don’t eat beef because beef is the No. 1 contributor to climate change among the typical proteins out there, but I do eat some other meat now. 

I think that it’s really fun to cook without meat. I think you can get more variety. There’s a lot of food from all over the world that’s vegetarian. Indian and Mexican food are go-to’s for being really flavorful and often vegetarian. One thing that I really like is tacos with black beans and roasted sweet potatoes.

Sam: Black beans and sweet potatoes are an elite combination.

Sara: So tasty, you just gotta spice it.

Pearl: Everything needs to be seasoned. Even if it is meat, it needs to be seasoned. I don’t know how people eat anything without putting seasoning on it, but it happens.

When we were in Puerto Rico recently, we went to this vegan food truck, and they make the most amazing food. They have this fried mushroom sandwich that was amazing. And they had this chili with tofu and taro chips. And it was just unbelievable. And I tried to recreate it. Sometimes I find with the tofu chunks they still kind of have that artificial, kind of rubbery taste. But I realized the secret is soaking it well and then seasoning it well and letting it soak into that flavor for a period of time.

I was a vegetarian. I became vegetarian when I was 10, not for climate reasons. It was more watching a chicken get its head chopped off. It was already dead, but it was laying out and it was kind of just realizing where my food came from and getting a little bit grossed out about that. So I was vegetarian for a couple of years, but even after that, I always have chosen more vegetarian options when I go out, or even eating at home. I could very easily just do a full-on vegetarian diet, but I do eat a significant amount of chicken now. It’s just an easy go-to, and everybody else in the household likes chicken.

Sam: I do buy the pre-marinated tofu from the grocery store for stir-fries and I think it’s pretty good.

Pearl: I don’t think I could be 100% vegan. I have too much of an affinity for cheese. And I know cheese is a really bad one. I mean, I’m embarrassing to take to an Italian restaurant. You know when they come over to ask if you want Parmesan cheese? They have to stand there for a really, really long time as they grate the cheese over my plate.

Sara: I hear that the vegan cheeses are getting better.

Pearl: They have come a long way, for sure.

Sam: To get specific about climate emissions and food, we’ve been talking about generally eating less meat, because meat requires one, a lot of land to produce. But then also, there are emissions associated with animals. Beef production has a lot of associated greenhouse gas emissions and part of that is because it takes a lot of land.

Sara: Can we talk about trophic levels, really nerd out?

Sam: Let’s do it.

Sara: OK, so every organism needs energy to live. And so if you’re eating just plants, you’re eating organisms that got their energy directly from the sun. That’s pretty efficient.

But if you’re eating a cow, it had to eat the plants to get its energy, and then when you eat the cow, you get some of that energy. By the time those calories get to your mouth, a lot of the energy that the cow got from the plants has already been used just to keep the cow alive and growing. So eating meat is a less efficient way to transfer the sun’s energy to your mouth, and it requires more land and other resources.  

Pearl: We’ve done some radio stories about meatless Mondays or meals where you’re not eating meat. I think that’s a nice, moderate way of thinking about it as a person of extremes. I don’t think you have to be full-on militaristic about the way you eat. 

Sara: I think the flexitarian model is really helpful and less moralizing than some other approaches. Flexitarian is when you’re eating a lot of vegetables and other plant-based food, but if you’re at your grandma’s house and she serves you a turkey burger, you go ahead and eat it. 

Pearl: A turkey burger is way better than having a hamburger. 

Sam: I definitely live in that flexitarian space. As I became an adult and started cooking for myself, I was just afraid of cooking meat, afraid of not cooking it enough. If I’m at somebody’s house and they’re serving me something, I will always eat it. But when I’m cooking for myself, I’m mostly cooking vegetarian. And I love a black bean burger. 

I don’t need any of that Impossible meat thing. 

Sara: Yeah, let’s talk about that.

Sam: I’m not interested in tasting beef, real or fake.

Pearl: The texture of a hamburger — it’s a weird thing and I’m not really about it.

Sara: I have tried a bunch of different fake meats for the novelty of it and have always come back to thinking that a black bean burger just tastes better than any of those. Some of them, at least as of a few years ago, when I was on this kick, I think they live in this kind of Uncanny Valley where it tastes like neither plant nor meat.

Pearl: Alien.  

Sara: It’s actually distressing.

Pearl: Yeah, I kind of want to know what I’m eating. I want to kind of see what it is, where it came from. I want to see the bean.

Sara: I don’t want to eat something that’s pretending to be something else.

Pearl: I don’t want to be friends with someone that’s pretending to be someone else.

Sam: Break up with the burger.

So a large majority of food-related pollution comes from agriculture and land use. And a much, much smaller share comes from refrigeration, the transport of food, industrial processes like production, and the management of food waste. But the thing that sets food waste apart, in that category, is that if less food was wasted, then you would produce less. How do you all think about food waste?

Sara: I do a couple of things now that I’m a boring, middle-aged person. My partner and I have a schedule for removing science experiments from our fridge. We do it every two weeks, and it’s so boring, but it really helps to have that regular cleanout. Then we can see what’s there and waste less of it. We also have a compost bin. We’re not valedictorians of composting by any means, but at the sort of level of effort that we put in, it’s pretty easy to manage. 

Sam: Produce is hard, especially if you’re one person living alone. It’s like, how am I gonna eat all these grapes before they go bad? But my solution to that is I try to look at the end of the week at what I haven’t used and see if I can freeze it. And then I’m eating frozen grapes, which are also good in the summer. But I’m certainly not perfect at this.

Pearl: One thing that Katharine Hayhoe mentioned in her newsletter was that South Korea turns nearly 98% of their food waste into biogas, fertilizer, and livestock feed.

Sara: Wow, that’s impressive.

Pearl: And in France, the supermarkets have to donate unused food to food pantries. 

I started composting in 2020. I took the Carbonauts course on lessening my carbon footprint, and that was one of the things that you could do. It’s been amazing. I mean, we’ve definitely reduced our trash by at least 50% and now we have this beautiful soil that we can use. There’s a restaurant down the road that all their containers are compostable. So I can put the containers directly into my compost. So I feel very good about this. It’s also very weird because it looks exactly like plastic. 

Sam: I’ve wondered about that stuff. You’ve seen it go into soil? It disappears?

Pearl: Within 90 days, yeah, it kind of disintegrates. There are some pieces where you’re supposed