
Gidon Eshel is a geophysicist whose impactful research focuses on sustainable food systems and environmental science with a unique emphasis on numerical modeling and statistical quantitative rigor. Eshel's key publications include a number of articles on sustainable beef production in such top-tier journals as PNAS, Environmental Science & Technology, PLOS Biology, and Nature Ecology and Evolution, also discussed in Nature's Research Highlights. Eshel is the author of the technical monographs Spatiotemporal Data Analysis (Princeton 20212) and Planetary Eating (MIT 2025). Recognized for his public leadership, he has received both a Radcliffe Fellowship (2016–17) and a PopTech Science and Public Leadership Fellowship (2010–12). His expertise has been featured in public forums, including an appearance in Leonardo DiCaprio’s 2016 documentary Before the Flood, and he has given presentations at institutions such as MIT, Harvard University, Yale School of Forestry, and the Culinary Institute of America. He is currently a Research Professor at Bard College as well as a conceptual environmental consultant to various businesses and NGOs.
Planetary Eating is a very rigorous examination of the mechanisms of human–planet interactions, agriculture and food production, and consumption set in motion. While other books address the environmental problems associated with agriculture, most are qualitative and promote a specific agricultural model, often in rather partisan tones. In other words, they offer a prescription. Yet because the physical constraints agriculture functions within are so diverse, and so variable in time and geographically, no single agricultural model can be reasonably expected to optimally address all of them, and indeed none does. Instead, most of these models are in fact mutually synergistically complementary. To know which agricultural models are best suited for a given scenario, and how they can be optimally deployed to maximize food delivery and nutritional quality while simultaneously minimizing environmental costs, the full suite of physical, biological, and chemical processes that govern agriculture, and their deep planetary roots must be understood. Planetary Eating is the first popular book I am aware of that describes authoritatively these processes and their planetary background in sufficient scientific detail while maintaining accessibility to non-specialist readers who are curious and willing to negotiate the requisite intellectual heavy lifting.

Gidon Eshel Planetary Eating: The Hidden Links between Your Plate and Our Cosmic Neighborhood MITPress 300 pp., 6 x 9 in ISBN: 9780262552141

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