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. Likely most unfortunate is conscientious individuals who go to great lengths in their quest to minimize environmental impacts following 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.