Waggle dancing
A tentative first step in discovering new stories for the table—on growing, eating, and sharing food equitably in a rapidly warming world. And other environmental stories.
Arriving back at the nest, a bee with news to share immediately proceeds to the dance floor, where other bees waiting for news gather around her. During the waggle, she dances a figure-eight pattern, with a straight “walk” in between the loops and a sporadic fluttering of her wings. #
Friends, readers,
This letter is the first of a series in which I explore the connections between food, climate, justice, and everything in between, to learn more of the contextual bigger picture in order to better report and write about it—and at the same time, share it with you. Journalistic and public interest in food systems as a driver of climate change is growing, but it’s still often relegated in importance compared to other drivers—surprising, when you think about it, considering eating is something we do every day at least three times day; though also, not so surprising, since it’s so closely linked to our culture, traditions, and identities, and any suggestion of change can be contentious.
To kick this off, I’ve written a long introductory piece here about what sparked my interest in all this as well as some of the research I’ve read, in four parts:
For a long time, I was happy just to marvel at what turned up on my plate, and dig in. →
But our global food systems are not only threatened by climate change, they are also a major contributor to climate change. →
Now, in feeling for a place to begin writing, I’ve gravitated to food as a lens through which to explore deeper questions about how we live alongside the natural world, in the hot midst of climate change. →
Finally, a reminder of nature’s resilience: imagine a field of undulating sunflowers in Chernobyl, Ukraine. →
I hope you find something in here that shifts something in your mind.
1. A surprising taste of sunflower oil
A few years ago at the Culinarium Khasheria in Tbilisi, I tore off a piece of bread and dipped it into a pod of sunflower oil—possibly a little doubtful, possibly wondering if I should ask for olive oil instead. What followed was a moment of surprised comprehension, the kind where you realize that something you’ve always known was only ever a shade of the truth.
All my life, I’ve only ever known sunflower oil as cooking oil. It was what my grandmother and my mother used in their kitchens. It was what I used to grease the wok with as a child, as I stood on a wooden stool to reach the stove so I could fry an egg—the first thing I ever learned how to cook myself, so I could feed myself whenever I was hungry. When I grew older and had to stock my own kitchen in whatever country I was in, I always preferred sesame oil for Asian dishes and olive oil for “Western” dishes. Sunflower was a functional oil, not something you would eat on its own. I never associated a definitive taste to it.
So, the first time I tasted it on its own at Tekuna Gachechiladze’s first restaurant—she’s a chef often credited for kickstarting the city’s contemporary culinary scene—I was wholly unprepared for it. I couldn’t get enough of its brimming nuttiness. And our memories are so deeply enmeshed, such that unraveling one unravels another, and another. As the war in Ukraine broke out, I read about how it could plunge the world further into a food crisis (with effects as far-reaching as Southeast Asia) since both Ukraine and Russia are major agricultural export producers, including of sunflower oil. Then I started thinking, too, of the disputed territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia that Russia also stakes some kind of claim on, and the food I ate and loved in that country.
What was so different about this sunflower oil? I never tried to find out. Like any Malaysian, I often say that I live to eat. And for a long time, I was content simply to take whatever pleasure I could in what I ate, the surroundings in which I ate, and who I ate with—all the things that make our most vivid memories.
As I traveled alone, food was often my entry point into cultures entirely new to me, a means of connecting with strangers. My trip to Tbilisi itself was the culmination of a trail of crumbs I followed, from a Georgian restaurant in Moscow (its cavernous ambience is seared into my memory, but I can’t remember its name) to the always welcoming Little Georgia in East London to, finally, many others in Tbilisi that I’ve pinned on Google Maps with a heart. Any time Georgia comes up, even in passing, I talk, with great affection, about the food—the khachapuri, the lobiani, the walnut paste on aubergine—and how they mark my favourite moments of camaraderie. For me, too, food is the tableau upon which families show love when they don’t have the words, upon which conversations meander until you’re the last patrons left in a dimly lit restaurant and new intimacies are forged. It has been the primary way I have made new friends, and the way I have kept them. We share food, and we share ourselves.
Funnily enough, despite the centrality food has always had in my life, I never felt the urge to write about it. I did the very occasional food feature when commissioned, but never pitched stories myself. I was never interested in restaurant reviews, perhaps feeling in it a level of subjectivity too fraught and too unforgiving for people’s livelihoods, happy just to point friends to this or that. In truth, I thought I would be terrible at it, that I would have no idea how to describe taste in so many different ways. I found myself interested in food history and politics, which align more closely with my general curiosity and concerns, but didn’t feel I had an eye for those kinds of stories, and they didn’t feel entirely urgent to me in comparison to other matters—clearly an oversight on my part. Good food was simply a joy, a gift, from the people who made it, and I felt no need to demystify it. When I was a child, my father would grin and point out the uncle perspiring through his thin shirt at our favourite nga choy gai stall in Ipoh—serving poached chicken and blanched beansprouts, with kway teow soup—and say, See, how he puts his sweat into it? That’s the secret sauce that can’t be replicated. I was happy just to marvel at what turned up on my plate, and dig in.
These days, that has changed for me, as I sense it has for others too. First, a percolating awareness that how we eat directly impacts our warming planet as the climate crisis began to lead the news agenda, then bulldozed into one’s daily consciousness when the pandemic hit and restaurants and supply chains faltered, thrusting concerns about our food security and long-held assumptions about how we eat into the spotlight.
During this time, we were also reminded how our industrial farming of animals, not just wet markets hawking wildlife, can create the perfect breeding ground for the spillover of zoonotic disease—such as in 2009, when the H1N1 swine flu circulated around pig farms in the U.S. and jumped to humans; or a decade earlier, when the Nipah virus from wild fruit bats infected Malaysian pig farms and also hopped into humans. This process is further facilitated by our shrinking forests, which breaks down the buffer zone that would otherwise protect us from wildlife carrying diseases. Covid-19’s origins, as well as its mode of introduction into the human population, are still being investigated, but at least some of the science has hypothesized that the virus most likely originated from wild bats, which was, whether directly or indirectly, then transmitted to humans.
At the same time, to prevent the spread of disease on overcrowded farms, livestock are routinely pumped with antibiotics (according to one estimate: 73 percent of antimicrobials, including antibiotics, sold globally are used in livestock). This risks making them, and us, even more resistant to them—when antimicrobial resistance is already a leading cause of human deaths, set to take more lives than cancer by 2050 if business continues as usual.
The more I read, the more I’m finding out how how we eat plays into every aspect of our lives—with important consequences for climate change, our dwindling forests and wildlife, food security, and public health. The more I read, the more I’m realizing how much I never knew about the most basic aspects of our most basic act of survival and how it shapes our world.
But how do we begin to truly inhabit what we know of our present moment, especially when it comes to something so deeply imbued with our habits, values, and traditions?
2. The big picture of food
Let’s start with this dilemma:
Our global food systems are not only threatened by climate change, they are also a major contributor to climate change.
Bear with me as I get into the numbers:1
Earth has warmed by 1.3°C since 1850–1900.
In 2015, world leaders had pledged under the Paris Climate Agreement to try to limit global heating to 1.5°C to 2°C. (Half or even 1°C of heating may not sound like much; here’s why it is.)
However, the IPCC predicts in its latest report that we’ll blow past both targets within this century—with the average global temperature rising by 1.5°C as early as the 2030s—unless greenhouse gas emissions are significantly reduced in the coming decades. It concluded that achieving the minimum target of 1.5°C will be impossible unless “immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors” are implemented so that CO2 emissions can reach net zero by the early 2050s, or by the early 2070s in order to achieve 2°C. Some places in the world have already warmed by 2°C.
That’s my emphasis on “all sectors”. It’s been well established that we need to reduce the burning of fossil fuels to cut greenhouse gas emissions. However, I hadn’t realised that our food systems (including production, processing, transport, and consumption) are also a consequential contributor, responsible for a quarter to a third of the world’s total emissions—this range comes from two recent and often cited studies: one published in 2018 by Poore and Nemecek2 and another in 2021 by Crippa et al. In 2020, another study found that if we were to continue eating and producing food the way we do, even if we stopped burning fossil fuels and eliminate all other emissions immediately, we would still overshoot 1.5°C by 2050 with food emissions alone. The countries with the largest food systems emissions? China, Indonesia, U.S., Brazil, and India.
Importantly, beyond emissions, agriculture also uses a disproportionate amount of finite resources like land and water, which is worrying as the world population—projected to reach 10.9 billion by 2100 from 7.7 billion in 2019—grows.
Agricultural land already takes up half the world’s habitable surface, while forests make up 37 percent. Of this land, 87 percent is used for food; the rest, biofuels, textile crops, and other uses, according to Poore and Nemecek.
Agriculture is also the leading driver of both forest loss and biodiversity loss globally, causing 90 percent of deforestation and threatening the existence of 86 percent of endangered species. Consider this: 96 percent of all the world’s mammals (excluding humans) are livestock, while just 6 percent are wildlife.
Add to that, too, the fact that agriculture uses up 70 percent of global freshwater withdrawals and causes 78 percent of global ocean and freshwater pollution, and a truly unsustainable picture emerges of how we eat.
In all this, animal agriculture plays a significant part, responsible for an estimated 14.5 to 28.1 percent of total global greenhouse gas emissions.
Narrowing the picture a little: according to a 2021 study by Xiaoming Lu et al,3 of total global agricultural emissions, animal-based foods (including crops farmed for their feed) makes up 57 percent, while plant-based foods make up 29 percent. According to McKinsey & Co., if all the cattle in the world were a country, it would be the second largest emitter after China.
Poore and Nemecek also found roughly the same in their earlier study analysing data from roughly 38,700 farms in 119 countries. In addition, they also found a large variability in environmental impact between different farms producing the same product, but concluded that even the lowest-impact meat and dairy products, as well as the lowest-impact aquaculture systems, still cause more environmental harm than the highest-impact vegetable or cereal.
As well, in terms of land use, animal agriculture itself drives 40 percent of global deforestation and occupies 77 percent of total arable land, including for livestock grazing and growing animal feed crops.
In fact, a substantial 41 percent of the world’s cereals—and, for instance, 77 percent of global soy production—goes to feeding animals, not humans directly.
Despite this, animal agriculture only produces 18 percent of the world’s calories and 37 percent of total protein. This is hardly efficient. For every 100 calories you feed a cow, you only get two calories of beef back; for poultry, 13 calories for every 100 calories. It also takes 100 times more land to produce a kilocalorie of beef than a kilocalorie of plant-based foods; same for a gram of protein.
For illustrative purposes, Poore and Nemecek found that cutting animal-based products from our current diets could reduce food production’s land use by 76 percent, even as plant-based equivalents are cultivated in their place to feed the world. If we don’t get that far, even halving the use of animal-based products could reduce land use by 67 percent.
As Hilal Elver, a former U.N. Human Rights Office’s Special Rapporteur on the right to food, concluded in a 2015 report, “The world’s current consumption pattern of meat and dairy products is a major driver of climate change and climate change can only be effectively addressed if demand for these products is reduced.” She also recommended that “nations with emerging economies must increase awareness of the implications of meat consumption, while developed countries should demonstrate a willingness to modify consumption behaviour and avoid food waste”. This seems cautiously worded to take into account the existing inequities between countries, while keeping in mind that as a country gets richer, its appetite for meat also increases. (It should be noted that no one is recommending that indigenous and poor communities who depend on hunting and breeding or eating animals to survive be deprived of their livelihoods.)
Olivier De Schutter, another former U.N. Special Rapporteur on the right to food, also said in a 2014 report, “The precise figures remain debated, but there is no doubt in the scientific community that the impacts of livestock production are massive.”4 Taking all this into account, the call to reduce meat intake by those who can afford to is surely not a radical proposition. It’s a call that has already made its way into the mainstream media; the IPCC recommended the same in a 2019 report on climate change and land use. Yet, I’ve listened in on panel discussions, especially where meat industry representatives are present, where the question is easily deflected without any pushback at all.
Last, but very definitely not least, let’s not forget food waste, which amounts to about a quarter of all the food we produce—spoiled or left uneaten in supply chains, or discarded by retailers, restaurants, and consumers.
Globally, it amounts to at least six percent of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions. Put into context: global food waste emissions are three times the global emissions from aviation; or, if food waste was a country, it would be the world’s third largest emitter of greenhouse gases, after China and the U.S. That’s why you’ll hear experts saying that the problem with food insecurity isn’t really insufficient food production. We already produce enough to feed the world. It’s our economic and social systems that need to change.
All this should feel galvanizing, especially if you’re someone who thinks of yourself as someone who “follows the science”. However, critics say there is still a noticeable lack of attention on the contributions of our food systems to climate change, even as recently as the twenty-sixth U.N. Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP 26) in November last year. Even in the IPCC’s most recent report, published in April, governments tried to water down scientists’ recommendations on reducing meat consumption.
I know I’ve rattled off a lot of sweeping figures here. They’re just a place to begin to connect the dots, with each figure encompassing whole other sets of analyses. Being global calculations they, of course, overlook local variations. For instance, an interesting thing Lu et al found in their study: rice is the largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions among plant-based foods, and South and Southeast Asia are the only regions in the world where plant-based emissions are larger than animal-based emissions. So, a different set of solutions may be needed here.
Still, given how entangled we all are, it would be a mistake to think that some of us can claim not to be implicated by detrimental food practices happening elsewhere. After all, we consume imported food, we travel, some of us live broad for some period of our lives. The big picture also matters. And unfairly, given the distributional imbalances of our hyper-globalised world, it’s the poor who are most vulnerable to the environmental impacts largely caused by the rich. This includes small-scale farmers, whose existence become less and less tenable as large corporations wield more and more political power, even as the former make up more than 70 percent of all farmers globally and produce 80 percent of the world’s food.
A glimpse of the inequities we’re talking about: in 2020, the average American had an annual CO2 footprint of 14.24 tons, the average German 7.69 tons, the average Malaysian 8.42 tons (higher than I thought), the average Indian 1.77 tons, and the average Somalian 0.04 tons. Reportedly, the world’s ten most food-insecure countries generate less than half a ton of CO2 per person, and collectively generate just 0.08% of total global CO2.
What does all this mean for how we grow, eat, and share food equitably in a rapidly warming world?
3. Searching for a place to begin writing
These realities have been creeping around the peripheries of my thoughts for the past two years. The difficulty I often feel as a writer is that I’ll find something interesting, but not quite know what to do with it—yet. Sometimes, I wonder how far I should let myself go down a road that starts calling to me. What if I lose interest halfway and it turns out to be a false start? Then again, what if it turns out to be a road I want to keep going down, the more steps I take? I’m beginning to learn that sometimes, the act of doing itself builds the motivation.
The other day, I was reading the newsletter of another writer I follow. She writes without hang-ups about how she switches directions—from thinking she’ll be based in another foreign city to moving home three months later, from thinking she’ll be writing environmental stories during the pandemic to writing personal stories informed by grief. And I thought, why not? Is all writing not a quest? If you have a curious mind you’ll have multiple possible lines of enquiry, and you choose the one that most compels you at any one time. Maybe it’ll lead to one story, maybe more; maybe all it does is shift something in your mind, helps you frame further questions about the world differently—and that would be enough. When I feel paralyzed, I try to remind myself that I can’t go wrong with reading. I try to trust that whatever I learn will continuously shape my perspective and make its way into the stories I end up telling.
Now, having read just that little bit more (actually, hundreds of pages of eye-watering reports), I feel the impulse to orient more of my journalistic explorations around the climate crisis. I’ve covered environmental stories before, but in a piecemeal, unsustained effort, and mostly where human rights, needs, and wants take center stage. Of course, the climate crisis is often a story about the pursuit of justice for marginalized human communities, but it also forces us to look in a deeper way at how we relate to the natural world and other lifeforms that surround us—in fact, nurture us. It forces us to imagine the threats we may not be able to see or recognise until it is too late, at a time where we seem to be having, as Amitav Ghosh wrote, a crisis of the imagination.
Perhaps not so surprisingly, it was during the pandemic’s lockdowns that I grew into this desire—of wanting to be more in touch with the physical world, even as, at the same time, I found it more difficult than ever. Where I mostly reported from the ground before, I was suddenly talking to sources on the phone or via Zoom. Isolated by the comfort of my desk and the cacophonous omnipresence of social media, I found myself in a mental bog of ideas—not all ideas illuminate; some befuddle, some distort. My mind is a place I can get lost in, and poor W.C. often has to weed me out of its thickets, to remind me where I am and that other things matter besides what I am thinking about. I often retreat into a tunnel zone of focus, which he alternately admires and despairs of, and from which it’s difficult to retrieve me from. But it doesn’t always feel like focus. Sometimes, it feels like—pardon the well-worn pun—I can’t see the forest for the trees.
So, emerging from the pandemic’s second year, I told myself that, as an antidote, I would attempt to inhabit a state of being I named “grounded levity”. I want to engage more with my physical surroundings—light-heartedly, playfully, even. I want to hold on more to what’s tangible and elemental. And what is more elemental than what you eat, what grows from trees and from the ground, what keeps you alive?
For me, it’s food that has finally connected me to my surroundings on a more visceral level. Because knowing isn’t enough, knowing is just the beginning of a long journey; and I guess mine started when I realized how much beef I was routinely eating despite the environmental destruction it causes, and how much we waste in the course of elevating our desire to have the best and most varied food experiences above all other considerations when we eat. I started making vague efforts to cut back on beef in late 2019, and then more concertedly meat, and in doing so, I’ve made myself more aware of how how I eat affects the world around me, and new possibilities for “good food”. So, in feeling for a place to begin writing, I’ve gravitated to food as a lens through which to explore deeper questions about how we live alongside the natural world, in the hot midst of climate change.
Surrounded by so much teeming green in a place like Malaysia, its jungles oozing with leeches, it can be easy to forget that the planet is in dire straits, even as we hear about the seemingly endless series of land grabs and deforestation, especially during the pandemic when there were fewer eyes and boots on the ground. At dinner some weeks back, as a friend urged another friend to finish what little was left of her food instead of taking it away because of the packaging it would require, another friend said, a little impatiently, “Look, every person has their own environmental journey to make.” And it’s true: people have to come to their own views of the world. I know, because I’ve taken my own time.
But equally, people can only come to any kind of realization for themselves when they possess enabling knowledge. None of us, since we presumably all pride ourselves on our independent minds, like to be told to just do anything, much less because it’s the “right” thing to do. We want to know why, to come to our own conclusions; and here, we finally have an opportune occasion—an open road, really—to explore. Living fully in our present world, as we all surely desire to do, is an unavoidably messy business. Eating even more so, even as it is also one of life’s simplest pleasures. But it’s this very messiness, I think, that invites reflection—and imagination. I have so many questions, and it feels really rewarding to just go about trying to find answers to them. And as I begin to ferret about in a landscape of new possibilities, I want to keep in mind not just how we wish our world to be, but also to engage with how it currently is, no matter how inconveniently compromised by our own past actions, in hopes of arriving at a better place. I have always been more comfortable dwelling between open questions than in absolute answers.
Writing this now also makes me think about the people in my life who might have nudged me a little in this direction, without any of us being cognizant of it. Dee May, a fellow café dweller pre-pandemic, has been shining a light on the invisible figures toiling along Malaysia’s food supply chain through her independent Plates magazine. Beatrice, who is a part of Eats, Shoots & Roots, a social enterprise in Kuala Lumpur encouraging more people to take up edible gardening, was always ordering more vegetables at our dinners and cheerfully haranguing us to stop using plastic. Dear W.C., who didn’t think badly of me when I called him, a vegan, “the fussier eater” on our second meeting (it turns out, I am), and who first got me to think about my foodprint by simply bringing and cooking me things that I have grown to love. Bel, an educator, who is always inclusive and open of others’ personal journeys of discovery. All the friends who have tried new foods with me, whenever I happened to be visiting their city. And anyone who has ever fed me, shared their food with me, and remembered what I love to eat.
Because—and I readily submit to the cliché—when you’re eating with someone, you’re listening harder to each other.
4. Coming back to that sunflower oil
Now, years later, I wanted to finally find out what was so different about that sunflower oil. I didn’t find too much Googling around, but I did stumble across a podcast featuring Olia Hercules, a Ukrainian chef and food writer based in London, speaking briefly about Ukrainian sunflower oil (not Georgian, but I’m quoting her story to make a point here):
Well, I don’t know if it’s necessarily unique—I think they do have it in France and obviously in other eastern European countries, but it is of such high quality, the unrefined sunflower oil, and it’s something that we use a lot as a finishing oil, both on fresh salads and also on your fermented vegetables in winter. It tastes like pressed, toasted sunflower seeds. And it’s incredible. It has almost the same intensity as a sesame oil would have, you know, in that kind of like nutty and rounded and sweet [taste] and this really dark and amber colour. It’s such a beautiful oil.
But you know what, for ages in the nineties after the Soviet Union broke up, everybody went off it. They were like, Oh sunflower oil, it’s so common. Everybody just suddenly got into very bad-quality olive oil. Suddenly, everyone was using olive oil. Now, recently in the past ten years, people were like, wait a minute, we’ve got this amazing produce and this amazing oil, why did we stop using that? I remember my mom, there was just a point where she went, Uhh, this olive oil is actually… it can be very amazing, but what we get in Ukraine is not very good quality, why are we not using what we’ve got growing in our backyard?
This reminds me of how much global trade truly has changed how we eat and what we eat, and the extent to which we’re all connected. You’ve probably already read about—or felt—how the war in Ukraine is ratcheting up food and fertilizer shortage and prices around the world, coming right off the back of Covid-19 and further exacerbated by climate change and existing inequities. Together, Ukraine and Russia supply about thirty percent of the world’s wheat needs. Ukraine is also the world’s largest producer and exporter of sunflower oil, with Russia ranking a close second.
Brought from Mexico to Europe in the early seventeenth century, sunflowers were cultivated in Ukraine from the mid-eighteenth century. These days, they are typically planted in April and harvested from mid-September to mid-October, predominantly in the southern and eastern regions of Ukraine—the hardest hit by war today. It’s fair to say they won’t be planted in the usual ritual this year.
In the early days after the outbreak of war, you would have seen the video of a defiant Ukrainian woman confronting an armed Russian soldier, telling him to put a handful of sunflower seeds in his pockets so they will grow when he dies on Ukrainian soil. Heard one way, it sounds like a chilling curse. Heard another way, it sounds like a strangely haunting benediction.
It makes me imagine a field of undulating sunflowers somewhere in Pervomaysk, southern Ukraine, where a nuclear missile base once stood. There, in June 1996, the American, Russian, and Ukrainian defense ministers had planted sunflowers to formally mark Ukraine’s complete nuclear disarmament. Until then, it had possessed the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal, which it had inherited in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Aside from its symbolism, the sunflower also shows us how nature can heal itself, given the right mix of circumstances. In 1986, in the wake of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant explosion in Ukraine, a group of scientists planted sunflowers in the surrounding area. They scattered the seeds over the desecrated land and waited for the flowers to reach into the sky, drawing radiation out of the soil as they grew. Once the sunflowers had absorbed the poison from the land, they were harvested. More sunflower seeds were scattered.
The scientists did this with the hope that, in time, the land would return to some semblance of its crude self. So that it could hold life again.
Every time I start to write a letter, I tell myself it will be short. It is never short. Thank you, as ever, for reading and for continuing to subscribe. If you’ve enjoyed Movable Worlds, please help spread the word.
Until the next,
I’ve linked most of the statistics in this letter to Our World in Data, as an easy first port of reference for you. It’s a website written and edited by researchers at the University of Oxford, and collects, attempts to reconcile, and translates into layman reading the available academic and scientific research and data pertaining to the world’s most urgent problems, including climate change. If you’re interested in deeper reading, trace their footnotes to find their primary sources.
Original source here by Poore and Nemecek. Footnoting this because it’s been touted as a landmark study, and I refer to it a couple more times in this section. Other scientists have commended its “bottom-up approach” in drawing from farm-by-farm data, and it’s been described as “the largest meta-analysis of food systems to date”.
Original study here by Xiaoming Xu et al. The author writes a more easily digestible version for mainstream media here.
If you’re wondering why I’m not quoting a more recent paper by the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the right to food, it’s because their publications are not simply standard annual updates. They deal with different themes every year, and these are two recent ones that I think offer a holistic picture of the environmental and human rights issues related to our food systems.
Thank you for a beautifully written and important article. This is definitely something that needs to be on more people's minds. And as dire as the situation is and as shocking as those numbers can be- on the matter of what we eat, we as normal people can have a real and tangible impact. Which, if not uplifting, is at least empowering!