Nearly a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions is created by growing, processing, and transporting food and disposing the waste. Ecologist Mark Easter asked the question “Can we cultivate from the Earth meals that nourish us, a Blue Plate of sorts, rather than the Earth being the meal itself?” Can we “eat our way out of the climate crisis”?

Easter’s book takes us across the country as he shows how modern farming methods negatively impacts the environment and how returning to pre-industrial farming methods maintains the soil and reduces carbon emissions. His broad study includes all aspects of food: vegetable farming, raising cattle and dairy farms, fishing, and animal and food waste management.

He offers suggestions of what we should have on our plate at meals. Eat local. Eat vegetables. Enjoy shellfish. Don’t throw food waste into the trash but compost it. But the book’s emphasis is not on the consumer end, but on the practises that can be changed to reduce carbon output and store it in the soil.

The book has aspects of memoir and travelogue as well as science facts while reporting his findings as Easter delved into how we get our food and the environmental costs of what we put on our plates.

Thanks to the publisher for a free book.