Foodprints: How To Sustainably Feed 10 Billion Healthy People - Paperback

by Galit Goldfarb (Author)

I did not set out to write this book.

I set out with a question I could not put down: by 2050 there will be nearly ten billion of us. Can we feed everyone well without wrecking the planet?

Four and a half years of doctoral research later I had an answer - and a life I no longer recognised. What my family eats changed completely. I was working on my own health at the time, and what I was finding changed how I ate my way through it. We cut our own footprint the hard way too: we left a 400-square-metre house for one of 84 square metres. We are happier in the small one.

I am telling you this so you know the book was not written from a distance.

Ten billion people. One planet. One question.

Feeding ten billion the way we feed ourselves today would take another 593 million hectares of farmland and eleven gigatonnes of greenhouse gas every year - land and atmosphere we do not have. The answer is not to do more of what we are already doing.

FOODPRINTS follows the food on your plate all the way back - to the soil it grew in, the water it drank, the fuel that moved it, and the people who never got any. Every food choice leaves a footprint. This book shows you what yours is, and what to do about it.

Inside:

• Why 95% of the world lives in less than optimal health, and what diet has to do with it
• Six proven methods for growing more food on the same land - agroforestry, conservation agriculture, rainwater harvesting and more
• What livestock really costs: 77% of the world's farmland for 18% of its calories
• The honest case for and against GM crops, gene editing, cultivated meat and precision fermentation
• Why hunger is a distribution problem, not a production problem
• How habit, price, taxes and nudges actually change what people eat
• The food pyramid this research recommends - and why official US dietary guidance has been moving in the opposite direction

Fully revised and updated for 2026, with the EAT-Lancet Commission's 2025 findings, the arrival of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, the evidence on ultra-processed food, the January 2026 reversal of US dietary guidance, and hunger data through 2025.

I am not asking you to take my word for any of it. That is what the 175 sources are for - and they are free to download.