Meet the three Scandinavian minds tackling the global food crisis head on

Everyone, no matter who you are, spends some portion of the day thinking about food. What to eat, when to eat, how much to eat, how much to spend on eating. It’s a necessity and occasionally a pleasure. It’s also destroying our planet and literally killing us.

“The food system on its own – how we produce food and consume food today – is the single largest threat to our future on planet earth,” says Prof Johan Rockström, Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research PIK. The 58-year-old Swedish scientist is the guy when it comes to scientifically studying global sustainability issues and how we might go about solving them. Rockström led the development of the nine planetary boundaries, a scientific framework that lays out nine areas (among them, climate change, global freshwater use, chemical pollution) and the limits we must adhere to in order to sustain a liveable life on our planet. So far, we’ve crossed six boundaries, leading humanity to be “well outside of the safe operating space”, according to Rockström.

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Put simply, food is acknowledged as responsible for one-third of our current climate crisis, but there’s another side to this ill-fated coin. “It’s not just about sustainability, it’s also that unhealthy food is the single largest killer on planet earth,” says Rockström, noting that there are 11 million premature deaths due to unhealthy food and malnutrition each year. “Half of the world’s population is malnourished. The food, which is supposed to nurture us and is so important to every single human on the planet, is causing a lot of trouble.”

Having just arrived to our photo studio by bike (despite the falling snow), Rockström is joined by friend and frequent collaborator Mattias Klum, an award winning Swedish photographer and conservationist who has dedicated much of his life to capturing the beauty of our planet and its destruction at our hands (he also captured Greta Thunberg for Vogue Scandinavia’s debut cover). The last person seated at the wooden table is Gunhild Stordalen, a Norwegian physician and environmental philanthropist who’s tackling the food system crisis head-on. In 2013, Stordalen, alongside Rockström and with Klum on the advisory board, founded the EAT Foundation, which takes a science-based approach to reforming the way we produce and consume food.

These are three people who spend more time than the average person thinking about food. Or rather, more time thinking about food systems. With Rockström leading the science, Klum leading the storytelling and Stordalen at the helm, they’re an environmental dream team, or as Klum puts it, “The Three Musketeers”. Growing up in the Norwegian countryside with “more animals than kids as friends”, Stordalen has known since she was seven that she wanted to dedicate her life to “making the most positive impact possible on the planet”. Coming from an ordinary family, she didn’t feel her voice would be heard, so she headed off to med school with the notion that “doctors are listened to”. Whilst studying in 2007, she witnessed Al Gore and the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change win the Nobel Peace Prize. That’s when climate change, specifically, became her cause.

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“I’ve never cared a lot about food beyond eating,” says Stordalen. “I’m not a good cook at all.” Her interest in the food industry was sparked via her ex-husband, Norwegian hospitality magnate Petter Stordalen. Serving on the board of Petter’s company, Nordic Choice Hotels, which owns about 200 properties and has since been renamed Strawberry, Stordalen became somewhat obsessed with making the hotel industry more sustainable. It was then that she discovered that the biggest contributor to a hotel’s environmental footprint is food and beverage. “I had no idea it was such a major contributor to climate change – deforestation, biodiversity loss, freshwater use, pollution,” she says, also noting its impact on both animal welfare and human health.

Stordalen started with an organic breakfast programme at her husband’s hotels. It was a failure. The infrastructure wasn’t there. Not only were there not enough viable farms from which to source the organic meat and produce, there were no governmental policies or incentives to back it up, nor any guidelines as to what healthy and sustainable food even was. “It was a system failure with no scientific answer,” she says. “I realised this was not an answer that a company in the Nordics needs to have. This is fundamental for the world.”

This revelation sparked EAT. Stordalen’s first order of business was to call the “smartest guy” she knew: Rockström. Rockström and Stordalen had been introduced some years earlier by none other than Klum. It only took one coffee meeting for Rockstöm to agree to become EAT’s chairman of the advisory board.

A striking woman with more than a passing resemblance to a young Brigitte Nielsen, Stordalen’s charisma and persuasive prowess cannot be overstated. That aside, one of the main reasons Rockström came on board was because of the way in which food uniquely connects sustainability and health. “It’s obvious that health is a much stronger lever for change than sustainability,” he says. “Rather than trying to protect the planet, you’re very keen on your own health.”

The other, and most compelling reason to get on board, he tells me, was the opportunity to connect with “the voices in the world who can really tell stories”. While no one can best Rockström when it comes to academically communicating sustainability issues, scientific rhetoric doesn’t always impact real change. As Klum puts it, telling stories in more visceral ways – in his case, through photography, filmmaking and lectures – “helps people to bridge the gap between people’s hearts and their brains”.

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So how does one eat sustainably? It’s a question that’s answered within The EAT-Lancet report, an academic paper developed by 37 scientists (Rockström included) that lays out what constitutes a healthy diet derived from a sustainable food system. What’s more, it lays out the steps required to speed up transformation to this gold standard. Published in The Lancet, the world’s most prestigious medical journal, in 2019, the EAT-Lancet report is still the most-cited Lancet commission ever. The day Rockström and I meet, he and his peers are at work on the second commission, which aims to better address the issue of lower-income households being able to afford to eat sustainably.

“More vegetables, more fruit, much more nuts,” says Rockström of the ideal diet. “Nuts are proven to be the most healthy, protein-rich food item.” Meat-eaters will be happy to learn meat is not out completely, however in the Western world, including the Nordics, we would have to cut back on our consumption of red meat by a factor of three or four. According to Rockström, that means one serving of meat (three to four ounces) per week, two servings of fish and two servings per week of white meat. “So it’s less animal protein, much more nuts, vegetables, fruit and much less starchy kilocalories and energy sources. Plus full grain cereals,” he says. “And that’s basically the package.”

But it isn’t enough for us to simply change our diets. As Stordalen said from the start, the entire system needs reform. According to the EAT-Lancet findings, one major change that needs to take place is on the production side. “We need to produce in harmony with nature – work with nature and not against it,” Stordalen says. “It’s perverse to farm and raise roughly 80 billion land animals every year to feed eight billion people.” Today, 50 per cent of the earth’s land is used for agriculture. According to Rockström we’ve “come to the end of the road of that era” – it’s vital to produce within our current farmland in order to have a sustainable food system. Shrink it, in fact. “That’s quite simple, actually,” says Rockström.

The good news, Rockström assures me, is that implementing the EAT-Lancet findings – the recommended diet and the systems to make it feasible – isn’t some fantastical pipe dream. What’s more, the projected results are staggering. “This could save the 11 million premature deaths because of unhealthy diet and you would transition back within the boundaries of freshwater biodiversity, nitrogen overloading, phosphorus overloading, and carbon – so greenhouse gases as well,” he says, referencing four of the nine planetary boundaries. “It’s totally doable,” says Stordalen. “It’s possible in theory to create a world where everyone has enough healthy food to eat without wrecking the planet.” But then Klum adds that vital caveat: “But we’re running out of time.”