EAT Lancet misses the point

A diet-first approach is the wrong entry point for transforming food systems and protecting planetary health. While the latest EAT-Lancet report broadens its lens beyond nutrients to justice and rights, it still places the Planetary Health Diet at the center of change. That framing overlooks how food is produced, who controls production and distribution, and the political economy shaping what reaches people’s plates.

What the report gets right

• It recognizes justice: many food system workers earn below a living wage, a minority of high-income consumers drive most impacts, and billions cannot afford a healthy diet.
• It endorses support for local markets, community stewardship of ecosystems, and a major reduction in pesticides and excess nitrogen use.
• It promotes whole, minimally processed foods and questions ultra-processed substitutes and speculative technologies.

Where it falls short

Despite invoking rights and justice, the report largely treats access to food as a matter of affordability and purchasing power, not as a guaranteed right or a question of food sovereignty. It proposes policy tools without confronting the core market logic that prioritizes profit maximization. Consequently, the recommendations are unlikely to deliver the structural changes the report itself deems necessary.

Farming practices: the intensification paradox

The report endorses “sustainable and ecological intensification.” Yet the efficiency paradigm that raises yields often reduces residues and root biomass, depleting soil carbon and biodiversity. Systems with lower land-use efficiency in food-per-hectare terms—such as well-managed grazing—can build soil carbon and support diverse ecosystems. What looks like “waste” in an efficiency frame (e.g., manure) is nutrient cycling in an ecological frame.

Pesticides, nitrogen, and yields

Calling for 70–95% reductions in pesticides and substantial cuts in synthetic nitrogen is welcome, as are cover crops, rotations, reduced tillage, and agroforestry. However, the expectation of maintained or cheaper yields across high-input systems is optimistic. Where yields are already high, transitioning to ecological practices typically requires more labor and can reduce output, especially in fruit and vegetables where pesticide dependence and nitrogen inefficiencies are pronounced. The proposed policy instruments are too weak to drive this transition at scale.

Land use and grasslands

Equating all grassland with active livestock grazing overstates agriculture’s land footprint and risks justifying grassland conversion. The report projects cropland expansion alongside grassland contraction and presents this as progress. Converting intact grasslands undermines biodiversity and carbon storage; many native grasslands sequester carbon effectively without tree planting. In regions where grassland abandonment is rising, biodiversity suffers. Treating reductions in grazing ruminants as an environmental win can be a lose-lose for ecosystems and cultures tied to pastoralism.

The Planetary Health Diet is not a system fix

The diet is optimized for health outcomes, not environmental impacts, and assumes universal adherence—no obesity, no undernutrition. Much of the claimed health benefit derives from eliminating underweight and obesity rather than from specific food swaps; within those swaps, whole grains deliver the largest gains. Evidence on strict limits for red meat is mixed and often insensitive to production methods and culinary practices. Meanwhile, strict limits on tubers conflict with other science-based dietary guidelines that value them as nutrient-dense staples.

Who really shapes demand?

The report leans on a demand-driven narrative: change diets and supply will follow. In reality, supply-side actors—farm input firms, processors, retailers, and governments—act as choice architects. They shape availability, prices, and norms. Assuming large price drops in livestock products simply because demand falls ignores how concentrated supply chains, cost structures, and policy supports determine prices.

Feasibility gaps: nuts, vegetables, and oils

Scaling nuts from a few grams to 50 grams per person per day is agronomically and logistically challenging. Expanding vegetables significantly while slashing pesticides and nitrogen is likewise difficult without major investments and labor. The diet also boosts vegetable oil consumption while restricting palm and coconut to a small share, even though these currently constitute a large portion of global supply. Replacing them would require rapid expansion of other oil crops and reconfiguring the tight linkage between soy oil and soy meal used in livestock feed. These system couplings are largely unaddressed.

Milk–meat accounting mismatch

Dairy and beef are co-produced. Globally, a substantial share of beef originates in dairy systems; scaling dairy while tightly restricting beef can produce arithmetic contradictions. Food-system design must account for these biological and market linkages, not treat commodities as independent levers.

Climate claims rest on external assumptions

Food-system emissions come roughly in thirds from fossil energy, land-use change, and on-farm biogenic emissions. The report’s scenarios assume full decarbonization of energy by 2050 and no further land conversion, delivering large emissions cuts that are not driven by the proposed diet. Even then, legacy emissions from already drained peatlands and wetlands persist for decades. Much of the modeled reduction also comes from halving food loss and waste and eliminating overconsumption, not from specific plate-level shifts. Presenting a halving of food emissions as a diet outcome alone misattributes the drivers of change.

Uncertain futures, heroic baselines

The scenarios rest on high confidence in population and strong per-capita GDP growth by mid-century. Given resource constraints, productivity slowdowns, and decarbonization challenges, these macro assumptions are uncertain. If such growth were to occur, its resource demands could overwhelm incremental dietary adjustments; if it does not, the scenario outputs become unreliable.

A better starting point

Transformation should begin with landscapes, livelihoods, and governance: regenerative and organic agro-ecosystems tailored to local ecologies; circular carbon, water, and nutrient flows; fair wages and farmer viability; and democratic control over food environments. Align diets to those agro-ecological realities and social priorities, not the other way around. Without restructuring power, incentives, and land stewardship, a diet-first strategy risks rearranging the menu while the kitchen stays the same.