To Michael Grunwald, an investigative journalist and author who has published three books, the process of writing a book is “hell.”
But being with a cohort of authors in the Watchdog Writers Group, a nonprofit journalism institute at the Missouri School of Journalism, meant he didn’t have to go through it alone.
“We could talk about hell together,” said Grunwald. “It’s really a magical program.”
The former WWG fellow published his third book in July titled “We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate.” The book investigates how the colossal expansion of farmland is taking up too much space and hurting the climate.
Grunwald’s reporting is instrumental in a long overdue conversation around land usage in agriculture and how to sustainably feed the world’s growing population without running out of space.
Grunwald’s writing “contains a lot of laughs, refreshing honesty and the joy of learning,” writes a Washington Post review. It leaves a reader with both a sense of “wonder at the human brains seeking to harness Earth’s capacity to heal itself” and a sense of urgency “of time slipping away.”
Grunwald has been a journalist for over 30 years, reporting on national politics, policy, energy, and agriculture. His work has been in The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, Time Magazine, and Politico Magazine.
The idea for Grunwald’s book came to him when he wrote an article about his own energy use. He wrote that he’s not the most environmentally conscious person. He doesn’t line dry his laundry or unplug his computer at night and still eats meat. He wondered, is eating meat really that bad for the environment?
Grunwald called his friend Tim Searchinger, a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute as the technical director of agriculture, forestry and ecosystems. Searchinger told him yes, eating meat is bad for the environment. Raising animals, especially cattle, causes deforestation and water pollution, and takes up a lot of space. Grunwald left the conversation thinking if he was ignorant about this problem, most people probably would be too. This led to his 5-year process of writing a book following Searchinger exploring the problems and solutions to how we use land and feed ourselves.
WWG reporter Maggie LeBeau spoke to Grunwald about his writing process and experience as a WWG fellow to share with future journalists.
LeBeau: After you had the question in your head about meat being bad for the environment, what did your process of writing this book look like?
Grunwald: It wasn’t like that day I said, “Oh, I need to write a book about this.” I did realize like, huh, there’s a lot I don’t know about this. It just really got me thinking, I know a lot about energy and climate, and food is a third of the problem, and I don’t know anything about it. And then, of course, that food is an even bigger part of the water pollution problem and the water shortage problem and the biodiversity loss problem, the deforestation problem. I really decided that if I was spectacularly ignorant, other people probably were too, and I just need to learn everything. And now that the book is out, after five years of work, some people are complaining about it, and they’re saying it’s biased this way or the other way, but I can honestly say that I didn’t really have preconceived notions because I didn’t really have any notions. I didn’t know anything.
LeBeau: How did you go from not knowing anything at all to writing a whole book about this topic?
Grunwald: Well, I started writing stories. I was still at Politico Magazine when I did it, and I remember writing one of the really early pieces about this notion that people were trying to make meat out of plants. Back at the time, this was still a really bizarre idea that hadn’t gone mainstream. I remember I did a story about the idea of burning trees for electricity. I knew that this whole idea of food and agriculture and land use, and this idea that our natural planet was becoming a kind of an agricultural planet, was this very important idea that I wanted to learn more about. There was a certain point where I realized this is a pretty important story. I always say that about once a year I have an idea that this is a book somebody ought to write. And about once every 10 years I have the idea. And then I’m kind of like, oh, I think I’m kind of that person.
LeBeau: Did you experience any pushback or have any big struggles while writing the book?
Grunwald: The big struggle was trying to get people to care. My auction for the book was wildly unsuccessful, and really the only bidder was my original publishing house, Simon and Schuster. They pretty much told me they were only bidding because they had done very well with my previous books, and they liked me, but didn’t think this was much of an idea. I didn’t have a lot of initial validation that this was something anybody else was going to care about. Except, I should say, from Chris [Leonard, WWG executive director] and my other fellows at the WWG. What I was doing was very different, I think, from what the others in my cohorts were doing, but they were incredibly supportive.
LeBeau: You mentioned how when you were selling the book, it was hard to get people to care. So now that the book has been out for a few months, what has the reception been?
Grunwald: It’s been good. One of the things I said when I started working on this was that I wanted to start a conversation that I felt like I was really writing about the most important environmental problem on Earth, and that the world wasn’t grappling with it. I wanted people to grapple, and they’ve grappled. It’s been interesting seeing the kind of bomb I set off. It’s always nice to get attention, but also to feel like you’re stirring stuff up.
I will say that a lot of the really nasty pushbacks have been from people who didn’t read the book, but just kind of have heard enough about the conclusions to not like it. While people who have actually read the book, including people who don’t love all the conclusions, have that’s led to some really great conversations and really good feedback.
LeBeau: In your book, you discuss a lot of complicated topics in depth. How in your writing did you go about explaining these topics to an average reader who doesn’t have a science background?
Grunwald: Making this readable was my hardest, and I felt at all times the most important challenge. I’m obsessed with every sentence. Is this going to be the sentence that they’re going to put down the book because it’s just too boring? I was also really determined. This book is relatively short compared to my first two books, and pretty much my one feedback from my editor was this cannot be super long. And I felt that way too. And one difference between all of us who are in journalism and even writing a magazine story, I’ve always felt like I know when my notebook is full and it’s time to write. But with books, your notebook is never full; it’s like you’ll never finish. And honestly if you look at it, almost any paragraph can be a chapter or an entire book. So, what I was really ruthless with myself about was, like, every sentence, every paragraph, every chapter, why is it here? Like, is this necessary?
LeBeau: Do you have any tips for other journalists who write about science or other complicated topics?
I think the most important thing is not to do what everyone else is doing. If you tackle a big enough problem, then whatever you find is going to be interesting and important. I had a really big idea that’s on the cover of the book, but so I tried really hard to make sure everything in the book was related to that idea. The hope is that people will leave the book kind of obsessed with that idea, that hopefully it’s something that you can’t unsee once you see it, this idea that the that we are eating the Earth. And so, a lot of the book is sort of me coming up with different ways to tell that story.
Another thing I tried to do, and this is sort of important for a book about the environment and climate, was not make it a complete Debbie downer, or at least not just make it about the problem, and that’s actually how I got to Tim.
LeBeau: You’ve been writing about energy and climate for 20 years. Especially when discussing land and agriculture in the environment, which can be a daunting topic, how do you as an environmental journalist stay positive?
Grunwald: I did want to tell as positive a story as I could. The book is maybe half about this kind of eating the Earth problem and then half about potential solutions. But the first punch line is none of those solutions really have much traction yet, right? And unlike the fossil fuel problem, we at least know what to do, and we’re actually sort of starting to do it, just not fast enough. One of the reasons I’m positive is because of my experience in energy, which I started really writing about it 20 years ago when it was like this, when there were no alternative to fossil fuels, except for maybe biofuels, which one of the messages of my book, and that I even knew back then, they suck, they’re not a real solution. And now, 20 years later, we’re in this clean energy revolution, and 90% of new power plants* around the world are zero emissions. So again, I do try to keep in mind that stuff changes and what I tried to tell myself is like the Lorax said, nothing’s gonna change unless somebody cares a whole lot and I was banging my spoon in my highchair saying, care. The hope is that this will kind of wake up enough people to have a kind of similar sort of evolution like we’ve had with fossil fuels. It’s going to be hard, but I think there’s something empowering about feeling like you’re trying to be part of the solution.
*Grunwald clarified the 90% figure as shorthand for power capacity, not new power plants.
Grunwald was a fellow with the Watchdog Writers Group in 2022. His student researcher, Jana Rose Schleis, is now a reporter and producer at KBIA, Mid-Missouri’s public radio station, and an instructor at the Missouri School of Journalism.
