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The question of how to feed humanity a nourishing and sustainable diet while protecting and restoring biodiversity and ensuring a stable climate continues to be one of the most pressing – as well as the most fascinating – challenges of our time. And whether or not we succeed in answering this over the century ahead will of course have a major bearing on all our lives and the future of the planet itself.
Eat the Planet Well, by Dave Goulson – ably assisted by his wife, Lara Goulson, whose recipe section is one of the most generous and welcome codas to a book imaginable – is an incisive, engaging, credible and inspiring contribution to the literature. I enjoyed it hugely, learned a lot from it, and would recommend it wholeheartedly to the widest possible readership.
In a series of relatively short chapters, Goulson brings his combination of in-depth scientific understanding and a grounded, human touch to an analysis of many of the key issues in the debate. These range from livestock to pesticides, artificial fertilisers to organic food, ultra-processed food to local produce, marine fisheries to the role of technology. And interspersed throughout are the Goulson family’s experiences of grappling with these questions, both by producing food themselves and by individually adopting a vegan, vegetarian or carnivorous diet. The book spans both the local and the global, and draws on both the academic evidence and lived experience and common sense.
Three particular dimensions of the book resonated with me. The first was Goulson’s return throughout to the thorny and wicked issue of pesticides, which he had treated at length in his earlier excellent book Silent Earth. The sheer scale of the world’s use of pesticides, and of their impact on human health and on the natural environment, is brought into stark relief in this new volume. His assessment, in my view, substantially strengthens the case for organic or regenerative agriculture, especially where agricultural yields in these approaches come closer to matching yields from more pesticide- and fertiliser-heavy methods of farming.
The second thing that appealed to me was Goulson’s essential conclusion, aligned perhaps most closely with the views of his eldest son, Finn, a “passionate vegan”, that most of us, at least in the richer parts of the world, need to move as close as possible to a vegan diet as we might reasonably manage. While Goulson does not call explicitly for this, and he gives due weight to those who believe in the role of good livestock management, it felt to me as I read the book that this was effectively the logical conclusion, or at least that many of us should end up eating very little meat and consuming just a little dairy if we can’t manage to become fully vegan.
Finally, I greatly valued Goulson’s in-depth focus on the art of growing fruit and vegetables, reducing food loss and waste, and composting and cultivating biodiversity at home. There is so much we can all do, in our gardens, in our window boxes, in our schools, or on the nation’s allotments, if we are lucky enough to have the room to do so.
And it is here that the recipes and the advice on growing food are so inspiring and practical. Readers will leave the book not only with an in-depth understanding of the issues with our food systems at the global level, but also with an informed primer on what we can all do locally on the land within our individual circumstances, so as to “eat the planet well”.
Eat the Planet Well: How to Fix Our Toxic Food System – One Meal at a Time by Dave Goulson. Jonathan Cape, 2026. ISBN: 9781787335622
