Video & Recap: The Climate Crisis on Our Plates: Rethinking Food and Farming

This wasn’t just a conversation about food—it was a call to rethink what we normalize, invest in, and fight for. Our food system is a top driver of climate change, but it’s also full of powerful, human-centered solutions. In this webinar, speakers unpacked how shifting diets, cutting food waste, and reimagining agriculture can unlock rapid progress.

We don’t need new tools—we need to use what works
Jon Foley, Ph.D. (Project Drawdown) grounded the conversation in clarity: food systems are responsible for up to a third of global emissions and are leading drivers of water use, pollution, and biodiversity loss. And we already know what works.

• Food systems are massive climate drivers: Agriculture uses 38% of global land,dominates resource use, and contributes 22% of global emissions—rising to 34% when including indirect emissions like refrigeration, transport, and food waste.
• Key culprits in emissions: The biggest drivers include deforestation, methane from ruminant livestock (esp. beef), fertilizer overuse, and rice paddies—with beef alone emitting ~25x-50x more CO₂ per pound than coal.

Action Opportunity: Support or invest in food system solutions that tackle waste, sustainable diets, fertilizer overuse, and forest protection—these have high climate impact and are ready to scale, but receive only ~3% of climate funding.  Improving farming practices and restoring natural lands are also part of the puzzle, but are smaller in their impact scale.

We’ve been trained to want the wrong things

Monique Mikhail (U.S. Director, Tilt Collective) asked us to zoom out: meat-heavy diets didn’t just happen—they were marketed into existence and supported by government policy. That means we can rewrite the script.

• Cultural shifts aren’t hypothetical—they’re historical. From wartime food campaigns to the explosion of fast food, our eating habits have changed quickly before. Our diets were designed. They can be redesigned.
• Shift the story. Tilt Collective is working with institutions on a range of strategic communications approaches to close the “perception gap”—the disconnect between what people want to eat and what they think others do. How we talk about food impacts what people believe is possible and normal.

Action Opportunity: Schools, universities, hospitals, workspaces, and public cafeterias can make plant-rich meals the default, reshaping norms and narratives.

We’re throwing away the future—and we don’t have to

Dana Gunders (President, ReFED) reminded us: over 1 billion meals are wasted every single day. That’s food that costs energy, water, labor, and land to produce—and most of those emissions happen before the food hits a landfill.

• Many solutions exist. Grocery chains are deploying AI tools that help predict demand and cut waste by 15%. Companies are upcycling “ugly” fruit into new, delicious products. Food rescue organizations are connecting surplus food to those who need it.
• Food waste isn’t just a supply chain issue. It’s a climate lever hiding in plain sight—an opportunity for massive emissions reductions, right now.

Action Opportunity: Elevate waste-cutting solutions from tech to table, leveraging that food waste is a “chameleon solution”—it resonates whether framed through climate, economics, or equity.

The debate is loud. The solutions are quiet—and working

Matthew Hayek, Ph.D. (Assistant Professor, Dept. of Environmental Studies, NYU ) called out the tendency to pit climate food solutions against one another—regenerative agriculture vs. plant-based diets, organic agriculture vs. industrial efficiency. But there’s no single path forward; there are many ways to reduce emissions, restore land, and improve health at once. 

• It is important to balance ambition with pragmatism: we must move past the “perfect vs. good” debate and act across multiple fronts. For example, reducing beef consumption remains one of the most impactful climate levers, even while acknowledging potential benefits of certain grazing practices.

• Matthew cautioned against overhyped claims (like soil carbon silver bullets), instead urging a “silver buckshot” strategy: many targeted, evidence-based interventions, tailored to different contexts.

Action Opportunity: Solutions like reducing meat intake and food waste are win-wins with relatively few trade-offs, but we can also support other efforts that reduce emissions, even if they’re imperfect.

The scale of global food systems and their impacts calls for courage—courage to tell better stories, eat differently, call out misinformation, and invest in solutions that reflect our values. The climate future we want is still on the table.

Resources:

For more on climate solutions in the global food system, visit Drawdown Food and check out the resources below.

Project Drawdown:

• Watch: Food Matters: Why climate change may hinge on what we eat & how we grow it
• Workshop: Drawdown Deep Dive: Reducing Food Waste (featuring: ReFED)
• Fixing food’s big climate problem
• How food and farming will determine the fate of planet Earth
• Greenwashing and denial won’t solve beef’s enormous climate problems
• Regenerative grazing is overhyped as a climate solution. We should do it anyway.
• How country-level diet shifts can reduce climate change impacts from the global food system through diet shifts
• 12% of the US population consumes 50% of the beef. “Demographic and Socioeconomic Correlates of Disproportionate Beef Consumption among US Adults in an Age of Global Warming“

Tilt Collective:

• • Read “Transforming the Global Food System: A Philanthropic Return on Investment Analysis“
  • Watch the TED Talk: “The hidden forces behind your food choices“
  • For regular updates, join Tilt Collective’s mailing list

ReFED:

• Read “From Surplus to Solutions: 2025 ReFED U.S. Food Waste Report”
• Check out the ReFED Insights Engine
• Register for the 2025 ReFED Food Waste Solutions Summit (June 23-25)
• For regular updates, please subscribe to ReFED’s newsletter:

Matthew Hayek, Ph.D.:

• Read: How Grass-fed beef needs far more land and emits more methane than feedlot grain-finished beef
• Read: How regenerative crop production methods mitigate greenhouse gases, but require more land

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