“Food is our common ground, a universal experience” – James Beard.

Dear Climate Healers,

The next system that I would like to scrutinize today is the global food system.

The System We Inherited

The global food system is a marvel of the modern era. It feeds billions of people. It has eliminated certain forms of famine that once killed millions. It has, by some measures, made food more accessible than at any previous point in human history.

These are real achievements, and they deserve acknowledgement.

But the global food system is also, by any honest accounting, one of the most ecologically costly enterprises in human history. It uses more than 80% of the world’s agricultural land. It drives the deforestation that has consumed the planet’s ancient forests. It is the primary cause of freshwater depletion, of dead zones in the ocean, of topsoil erosion that has been accumulating for centuries. It is responsible for the single largest share of emissions that are heating the planet.

And the food system extracts six times as much food biomass from the planet as humanity actually needs, measured by dry weight. Six times as much. And yet 800 million people go hungry, and the most common form of malnutrition in the richest countries on Earth is not protein deficiency or caloric shortage. It is fiber deficiency, a shortage of the most abundant nutrient in the simplest foods on the planet.

A food system that overproduces and undernourishes at the same time is not a food system that is working well. It is a food system that is working for something other than nourishment.

What is it working for? That is the gentle question I invite you to consider, with genuine curiosity. Because understanding what a system is actually optimized for is the first step toward asking whether it could be optimized for something else.

The Arithmetic of the Plate

There is a piece of arithmetic about the food system that, once you know it, is impossible to not know.

It takes, on average, 39 Kilograms of plant feed to produce 1 Kilogram of animal biomass for human consumption. The ratio varies by animal and method. Some are more efficient, many are less, but the overall conversion is deeply inefficient. This is a food system in which a very large amount of land, water, and energy is being used to produce a very small amount of food.

What this means, practically, is that if humanity shifted to a Vegan food system, somewhere in the region of five billion hectares of land, an area larger than North America and South America combined, could be returned to Nature, to forests, to grasslands, to wetlands, to the ecosystems that regulate rainfall, store carbon, and sustain the biodiversity on which all life ultimately depends.

This is not speculative calculation. It is straightforward arithmetic. And it suggests something that is rarely discussed in mainstream conversations about climate change. The food system, and specifically the animal agriculture at its core, may be the single most powerful lever available to humanity for addressing not just climate change, but the entire 26-limbed PolyCrisis, more powerful, and more immediately reversible, than any other lever.

The gentle invitation here is simply to know this arithmetic. To let it sit alongside what you currently believe about food and the planet, and to notice what questions it stirs.

What We Have Been Told

Most of us did not choose the food system we were born into. We were handed it, along with a set of stories that explained it and justified it. These stories are so thoroughly woven into the fabric of daily life that they rarely feel like stories at all. They feel like facts.

We were told that animal protein is essential, that without meat, we cannot be strong or healthy, that dairy is necessary for calcium and bone strength, that plant foods are incomplete, lacking in the nutrients the body needs. These messages arrived from early childhood, were reinforced in school, and were reiterated by the medical and nutritional establishment for decades.

The science and the facts tell a considerably different story. All amino acids, the building blocks of protein, are present in all plant foods. Every one of them in every one of them. Animals do not synthesize amino acids, but they obtain them from plants, or from other animals that ate plants. Going directly to plant foods is, nutritionally speaking, going to the original source.

The real question isn’t where you get your protein. The real question is why did we ever believe it could only come from animal foods!

The calcium and dairy story is even more divorced from reality. We are the only mammalian species that drinks milk past infancy and that too, the milk of another species that is five times our size. Their milk is baby food designed by Nature to make their babies grow from calf to cow in 18 months flat, while our babies grow from infant to adult in 18 years, slowly. How could that cow’s milk designed to make our bodies grow 50-60 times faster than it ever needs to grow, possibly be good food for us?

In the past, our ancestors may have used cow’s milk and its derivatives as medicine, but not for daily consumption as cheese and ice-cream. Remember that anything, even water, consumed to excess can kill us. It is clear that we are not drinking cow’s milk because we are uniquely clever among all mammalian species about nutrition. We are drinking cow’s milk because we are uniquely susceptible among all mammalian species to clever marketing.

Today, even the medicinal property of cow’s milk is questionable. Every teaspoon of cow’s milk commonly consumed today contains a PUS BATH – pus, urine, stools, blood, antibiotics, toxins and hormones. Every teaspoon can officially contain up to a few million pus cells in countries that even bother with such regulations.

It is also a fact that the countries with the highest rates of dairy consumption also have the highest rates of osteoporosis and hip fractures. The countries that consume the least dairy have some of the lowest. This is an observation that the relationship between dairy and bone health, as it has been presented to the public for generations, was always considerably more complicated than the dairy industry’s marketing suggested.

None of this is a call to feel deceived or manipulated, though some of what has happened in nutrition science over the past century has been genuinely influenced by powerful industry interests, in ways that are now reasonably well documented. It is simply an invitation to notice that the stories we have been told about food are just that, stories, and that stories can be examined, questioned, and, if necessary, gently revised.

The Pleasure and the Trap

I would be remiss to speak about the food system without acknowledging something important. Food is not just fuel. It is pleasure. It is memory. It is culture. It is love.

The smell of something cooking that your grandmother used to make, the particular texture of a dish that appears at every celebration your family has ever held, the feeling of sitting down to a meal with people you care about and sharing something that everyone recognizes, everyone knows how to eat, and that carries no awkwardness or explanation with it.

These things are real, and they matter. Any honest conversation about transforming the food system has to take them seriously, rather than waving them away as sentimentality or weakness.

At the same time, it is worth noticing that our taste preferences are not fixed. They are learned. They change across a lifetime, as anyone who has revisited a childhood favorite restaurant and found it disappointing can attest. The foods we grew up with feel natural because they are familiar, not because they are inevitable. Many people who have gone Vegan report, after a period of adjustment, that their tastes genuinely shifted, not through willpower or self-denial, but through the slow recalibration of our tastebuds that comes with exposure to different foods, different preparations, different cuisines.

There is an extraordinary range of human culinary tradition that is, and always has been Vegan. Indian roti and sabji. Ethiopian injera and lentil stew. Lebanese falafel and pita. Japanese miso and rice. Mexican beans and corn. Thai green curry and noodles. These are not compromises or substitutions. They are ancient, sophisticated, deeply satisfying food cultures, developed across centuries by our ancestors who were simply eating well.

The invitation here is not to abandon what you love. It is to expand what you know, and to allow curiosity to take you somewhere you might not have expected to find yourself enjoying.

Hungerless: Food as a Human Right

There are a couple of questions that sit quietly beneath all the conversations about food systems, sustainability, and planetary health and they are, in some ways, the most fundamental questions of all.

Why is anyone hungry? Why is anyone malnourished?

Not as a rhetorical flourish, but as genuine systems questions. The planet produces, right now, enough food to nourish more than ten billion people. The human population is eight billion. The arithmetic of scarcity, when examined honestly, does not hold. Hunger is not a production problem. It is a distribution problem, and distribution problems are, by their nature, problems of design, of values, and of competence in implementation.

On Planet A, food is a commodity. It flows where purchasing power directs it, pools where profit accumulates, and drains away from the places and people who need it most. The result is a world in which surplus and starvation coexist, in which grain is fed to animals in wealthy communities while children go without food in poor ones, and in which the most processed, least nourishing foods are often the most affordable and the most aggressively marketed.

Planet B proposes something different: a world in which access to healthy, nourishing, gourmet, delicious, whole-foods plant-based Vegan meals is a basic human right, freely available to every person on Earth, not as charity, not as emergency relief, but as a foundational expression of what a community owes its members.

Hungerless is the initiative that gives this idea a name and a shape. Its premise is straightforward: gourmet, delicious, whole-foods, plant-based Vegan meals should be freely available to every human being on the planet. Not sold. Not rationed. Not means-tested or bureaucratically distributed. Simply available, as water from a public fountain is available, as a park bench is available, as part of the common wealth of a community that has decided to honestly take care of its own people.

The scope of this vision is large, but its logic is not complicated. A whole-foods plant-based Vegan food system, as we have seen, uses a fraction of the land and resources of the current system. It produces more calories per hectare, with a fraction of the ecological cost. The arithmetic of abundance, when the inefficiency of animal agriculture is removed from the equation, is genuinely remarkable. There is enough. There has always been enough. The question is whether we are willing to organize ourselves around sufficiency rather than extraction for maximum profit.

In Planet B‘s understanding, nourishment is not a reward for economic productivity. It is a precondition for health, for learning, for participation in community life, for the capacity to contribute to the collective project of healing the planet. A person who is hungry or malnourished cannot think clearly, cannot work meaningfully, cannot engage fully with the life of their community. Ensuring that no one is hungry or malnourished is not an act of generosity toward the unfortunate. It is the minimum condition for a society in which everyone can play their part and enjoy their inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

This is why Hungerless begins not with individuals but with communities. In Planet B, it is the responsibility of the community, the neighborhood, the town, the city, to ensure that everyone within its purview is well nourished. Not the market. Not the charity sector. Not the individual household, left to navigate a confusing food system designed around profit rather than people. The community, as a whole, takes on the task of feeding itself, growing, preparing, sharing, and ensuring that the most nutritious food reaches everyone, and that no one is left out.

Hunger and malnutrition are not scarcity problems. They are design problems. And design problems can be solved.

There is something deeper here too. Hungerless, as an initiative, is not only about ending hunger. It is about transforming the relationship between people and food, and, through that, between people and each other, and people and the planet. When food is freely shared rather than individually purchased, something changes in the social fabric. Meals become communal rather than transactional. Growing food becomes a collective act rather than an industrial one. The kitchen and the garden become places of connection rather than sites of private consumption.

This is not an unfamiliar idea. It is, in fact, one of the oldest human arrangements. Communities have fed themselves collectively, across every culture and every era, long before the modern food industry existed. What Hungerless proposes is not a radical invention but a recovery, a return, at a scale the moment demands, to the understanding that food is something we do together.

The Hungerless initiative also carries within it a powerful accelerant for the broader system transformation. When gourmet, delicious, whole-foods, plant-based Vegan meals are freely available in every community, when the barrier of cost and unfamiliarity is removed, the case for change is no longer abstract. People taste it. They find, often to their surprise, that it is delicious. They discover that the meals they associated with eccentricity are, in practice, deeply satisfying. The first encounter with a beautifully prepared sabji, a fragrant rice dish, a richly spiced vegetable stew, prepared with skill and love, does more to shift food culture than any amount of facts and science.

This is how transformation actually happens, not through persuasion alone, but through experience. Hungerless creates the conditions for that experience to reach everyone unconditionally.

The Possibility of a Different System

Planet B does not require perfection. It requires a willingness to imagine that the current system is not the only possible system, and that a different arrangement, one that feeds everyone, honors the planet’s limits, and does not require the horribly institutionalized killing of 90 billion land animals and 1-3 trillion sea animals each year, is within reach.

Some of what this looks like is already visible. Community-supported agriculture schemes that reconnect people with the land and the seasons. Urban gardens that produce food in the spaces between buildings. School meal programs that have shifted to Vegan defaults and found that participation increased, food waste decreased, and nobody revolted. Farmers transitioning from animal agriculture to arable or horticulture, finding in many cases that the land produces more, more sustainably, than it did before.

None of these are sufficient on their own. But they are evidence, practical, measurable, and ongoing, that the current system is not the only way things can be arranged. They are the emerging network of experiments and innovations that, when they connect with each other and gather sufficient momentum, will eventually replace the system that is failing.

Food is the thread that connects land, water, climate, health, culture, and community. Shift the plate and you shift everything.

What each person can do is small in isolation, but significant in aggregate. The food system responds to demand. When enough people shift their demand, gradually, imperfectly, the system shifts too. This is not optimism. It is the observable history of every food trend, every dietary shift, every cuisine that has gone from obscure to mainstream in the blink of an eye.

The direction of that shift, right now, matters enormously. Not because any individual meal is decisive, but because the accumulated weight of three meals a day, multiplied by eight billion people, is one of the most powerful forces on the planet.

A Gentle Examination

This examination of our food system is an invitation to curiosity. The next time you are standing in a supermarket, or choosing from a menu, or deciding what to cook for the people you love, you might allow yourself to wonder: where did this come from? What did it take to produce it? What would the land it was grown on look like if it were used differently? What would I be eating if I lived somewhere else, in a different tradition, with a different set of stories about food?

You might wonder, equally, whether you feel well. Whether the food you eat gives you energy or drains it away. Whether your body, if you listened to it without the interference of habit and marketing and convenience, would ask for the same things you are currently giving it.

And you might wonder, gently, what it would mean to live in a community that took seriously its responsibility to ensure that everyone in it was well nourished. Not as a distant policy aspiration, but as a lived practice. What that would look like in your street, your town, your neighborhood. What the first small step toward it might be.

These are not rhetorical questions with predetermined answers. They are genuine invitations to notice. The food system we have is likely not the food system we were born into. It is the food system that was built, within living memory, for reasons that made a certain kind of economic sense to a certain set of powerful interests. It can be rebuilt, it is already being rebuilt, in small ways and large, in communities on every continent.

The first step is not a change of diet. The first step is a change of outlook, the willingness to look at what is on the plate, and at what lies behind it, and what it might become, with care and imagination, with open eyes and a genuinely curious heart.

For more ideas along these lines, please read There IS a Planet B and A Guide to Planet B.

With much love,