Why we need to shift to a Planet-Based Diet in the US (and how we can get there, together)
What we eat is a personal choice, a set of daily decisions that are driven by taste, culture, and circumstance. Most know that the food we eat can affect our health and well-being. But the science is overwhelming that the food system — how we produce and consume food — is driving negative impacts on nature and climate. WWF’s recently released 2020 Living Planet Report provides stark evidence that agricultural production is the primary cause of land-use change, including conversion of forests, grasslands, and wetlands to pasture and croplands, which is a major driver of greenhouse gas emissions. Agriculture can also cause the degradation of soil, water, and habitats — leading to critical biodiversity loss.
We can no longer ignore the connection between our individual food choices and the global impacts of food systems on nature and human health. What we eat, where and how it was produced, the diversity of our food basket, and the levels of consumption per person, all have implications for life on the planet.
Today, WWF released a report exploring a new approach to making food choices that can help ensure a healthy planet as well as healthy people. Bending the Curve: The Restorative Power of Planet-Based Diets will help individuals and policymakers understand the health and environmental impact of their diet. A ‘Planet-Based Diet’ is one that is both high in human health benefits and low in environmental impacts. The way in which we produce and consume food has pushed our planet beyond its boundaries — we are taking more than nature can provide. With this work, WWF hopes to open an inclusive and transparent dialogue with everyone from farmers to retailers to policymakers to consumers. Our goal is to create a shared vision of healthy, safe, regenerative, and resilient food systems in balance with nature.
The report is a ground-breaking exploration of the implications of current diets in 147 countries, including the US, and it examines projected environmental impacts if diets shifted to align with each country’s National Dietary Guidelines (NDG) and other current popular dietary patterns. This modeling exercise suggests that there would be huge benefits both for human and planetary health if current consumption patterns are altered on a large scale. For the US, transitioning to a planet-based diet could improve health outcomes, help scale back agriculture’s impact on freshwater, protect biodiversity by avoiding conversion of habitat like grasslands to cropland, and significantly decrease our diet-related greenhouse gas emissions.
The US has among the highest per capita emissions of any country in the world¹, and agriculture is a significant share of that footprint. While the US has improved production efficiencies over time, this has come with some high costs on cropland where corn growers, for instance, are applying nitrogen at a rate 40 times higher on average than three-quarters of a century ago. US ranchers and beef producers are among the most efficient in the world, with a 60 percent lower carbon footprint than the global average, but there are still improvements to be made in tackling impacts like water usage and conversion of grasslands for feed crops. And, we operate in a global food system; our demand for commodities like palm oil, coffee, and cocoa produced internationally is driving tropical deforestation, biodiversity loss, and other negative environmental impacts abroad.
Current consumption trends in the US have grown increasingly worrisome. More than half of the American population over consumes meat, such as beef and poultry, as well as foods with little to no nutritional value including sugar, saturated fats, and sodium, as compared to the recommendations of the US NDGs. About three-fourths of the US population are under-consuming healthy foods such as vegetables, fruits, dairy, pulses, and fish. As a result, more than two-thirds of adults and nearly one-third of kids are battling health challenges, including micronutrient deficiencies that lead to a variety of chronic diseases, and these rates have persisted for more than two decades.
There is no one-size-fits-all diet, and local context and culture matter. With more than 700 million people still hungry or malnourished in the world (and rising), there are places where we need to increase and improve our supply of and access to quality nutrition, which will require improving the efficiency and performance of all food production systems globally. But there is a paradox of hunger and malnutrition in America too. Pre-pandemic, around 11 percent of Americans — including more than 10 million children — were facing food insecurity. As unemployment and poverty climb in the face of COVID-19, in 2020 that number could rise to more than 54 million people, including 18 million children. And that hunger is happening while nearly 40 percent of our food supply is lost or wasted across the value chain. We must utilize more of what we grow to ensure all people are fed, ensure healthy options are accessible, and that our farmers are kept whole in the process.
WWF offers four recommendations for shifting to a more “planet-based” diet and food system in the US and how we can get there together:
Adopt ambitious National Dietary Guidelines that are better for the planet.
Eating in accordance with the current US NDGs would take Americans a long way toward achieving positive outcomes for human health and the environment. We need to work across sectors to fully implement shifts in diets in the US. But more ambition is needed in future guidelines to account for the impact on our health and the planet — and their development must be grounded in science.
We need to support policymakers with the data, tools, and analytics including the WWF Planet-Based Diets Impact & Action Calculator and the Food Systems Dashboard developed by GAIN and partners, to help decision-makers better understand social and environmental factors of food systems across regions and countries, including in the US.
Build efficient and resilient supply chains.
Planet-healthy consumption must consider our domestic and global supply chains and build efficiency and resiliency in the face of disruption. We need to produce more with less, optimizing inputs and yields, and building in resilience that protects and conserves longer-term assets rather than just maximizing short term gains. Sustained productivity gains in crop production have allowed farmers in the US to produce more food, fuel, and fiber while using 100 million fewer acres than three decades ago.
We also need to get more nutritious food distributed more equitably around the world without harming more lands and while protecting the rights of local communities. This may mean producing and exporting more from regions with higher efficiency while working collaboratively across jurisdictions and landscapes to prevent the impacts of food production in critical ecosystems or geographies with less efficient land productivity.
Food loss and waste (FLW) is also a huge inefficiency in our food system that must be drastically reduced. The USDA, FDA, and EPA have already set a multi-agency goal to reduce FLW 50 percent by 2030. Eliminating waste would ensure that the resources sacrificed to produce our food are not squandered.
Accelerate and scale regenerative agriculture.
Agriculture can be part of the solution for nature and climate and have impact on a significant scale. A planet-based diet should be made up of foods that have been produced from regenerative agricultural systems that help halt conversion of critical habitat; value and protect healthy soil and water resources; minimize pollutants; capture and store carbon; restore biodiversity; and provide safe, affordable, healthy food for all. Practices like cover cropping, no-till planting, integrating livestock into crop and forestry systems, and improved grazing management, can protect and enhance soils, improve water quality, reduce the need for inputs, sink carbon, and save precious resources.
Realign US policy and incentives.
The current incentive structure for US agriculture influences the overproduction of a few commodities, which has implications for dietary choices and for impacts on the environment. Of the hundreds of acres of cropland in the US, only four crops make up about 80 percent of total crop acreage, with a significant portion going for ethanol and biofuels, and less than 10 percent used to produce vegetables. Federal support for certain producers is significant and has grown substantially in recent years. Farmers and ranchers need robust and reliable safety nets to mitigate risk and disasters, especially in challenging times, but federal support should be better aligned to help deliver safe, affordable, and healthy food while protecting our environment.
A fundamental goal of the next Farm Bill should be to redirect federal farm support to deliver planet-based food systems, and more investment will be needed. This means incentivizing regenerative practices throughout Farm Bill programs. Conservation programs and conservation compliance efforts, federal requirements that tie commodity and crop insurance to support natural resource management and conservation of our soils, wetlands, grasslands, and freshwater system, should be significantly strengthened and applied more broadly. In one example, the SodSaver provision, which protects grasslands from tillage by reducing federal crop insurance premiums on land converted from native prairie, should be mandatory for all states. We must also reexamine the incentives that drive biofuel production, particularly ethanol.
It is not too late to reverse the current trajectory and restore nature while also improving the health of people. There are solutions available that will transform the food system and are good for people and the planet — and these solutions are being driven by the innovation of US producers. By combining these efforts with more efficient and resilient supply chains, a shift to more sustainable agriculture practices and policies that incentivize producing food with human nutrition and planetary-health at the forefront — we will see positive impacts on a global scale.
[1] Around 17.5 tonnes per capita in the US vs 10.1 tonnes in Germany, 6.0 tonnes in China, 2.5 tonnes in Brazil, 1.7 tonnes in India and 0.8 tonnes in Ghana. https://ourworldindata.org/per-capita-co2
