Key takeaways

• EAT Lancet 2.0 has a wider focus on socio-economic factors, which is a great improvement. Despite talk about human rights and justice most of the analysis and suggested measures are grounded in the market framework, however.

• The agriculture part is recommending many good practices and a radical reduction in the use of pesticides. But is not very convincing when it comes to the impacts on yields and cost of production. It can’t resolve inherent contradictions between the modernist emphasis on efficiency and the need to reduce human demands on the biosphere.

• They project an increase of crop lands and a decrease of grasslands, as a result of a drastic reduction in ruminant livestock. To decrease the contributions to the agri-food system of grazing ruminants is simply a lose-lose.

• The Planetary Health diet is based on a view of the food system as consumer driven, which is mistaken. There is also mismatch between the diet and the agriculture realities.

• Instead of using a diet as the entry point of the discussions of the food system, we should start in how we can manage the various agro-ecosystems in an organic/regenerative way. Diet will follow, as it always did.

• The implementation of the diet and the other proposed measures will not result in a halving of green house gas emissions of the food system, which has been claimed by EAT. Most of the reduction of the emissions will come from the phasing out of fossil fuels in the whole system. That this will happen is an assumption in the report and not linked to the policies and recommendations of EAT Lancet 2.0. Unfortunately, the huge impact this will have on the food system is also neglected in the report, which undermines the credibility of all scenarios.

• The scenarios are also built on a growth of the GDP with 127 percent in 30 years. This is both implausible and not desirable.

See also: The EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy, sustainable, and just food systems