Why do Democrats still support subsidies for rich farmers who hate them? It’s dumb policy and dumb politics. Stop obsessing about America’s 2 million farmers. Start thinking about America’s 350 million eaters.

Seven Republican states have banned cultivated meat, including my so-called Free State of Florida. What happened to free markets and free competition? Since when do politicians get to tell me what to eat?

Beyond Meat’s sizzle has fizzled. It’s gone from $250 to $2 a share. Because people don’t like it as much as animal meat! But that doesn’t mean they’ll never eat fake meat. The cow is a mature technology; biotech burgers can still get better and cheaper and even healthier.

Why is Impossible Foods still at Burger King and Starbucks, while Beyond Meat has plunged from $250 to $2 a share? Because consumers like Impossible’s GMO soy better than Beyond’s pea protein. Taste is king. The dogs gotta like the food.

I know, I’m a bore about how agriculture is eating the earth. Well, it’s drinking the earth, too. Water shortages aren’t caused by lawns or AI; they’re caused by the farms that use 70% of our fresh water.

Energy is now a political problem; we know the right answers. Food is still an analytical problem; we barely know the right questions. That’s why my book’s hero is an analyst. He figures out that we’re eating the earth, and he’s trying to figure out how we can eat less of it.

We shouldn’t keep throwing money at rich farmers with no strings attached. Agriculture is an important manufacturing industry, and we should help farmers manufacture even more food, but we should insist they do it with less mess.

Twinkies aren’t unhealthy because they have GMOs in them. They’re unhealthy because they’re Twinkies! GMO crops are safe, and gene-edited crops can help make more food with less land. There’s no need to freak out about them.

We need agriculture, because we need to eat. But the biggest problem with agriculture is that it’s eating the earth. Two of every five acres of land are now farms or pastures. We’re losing a soccer field worth of forest to agriculture every six seconds.

We all vote on food issues three times a day, and most of us don’t think about the impact of our diets. I wrote WE ARE EATING THE EARTH because I want people to understand the tradeoffs behind the choices we make. Eat what you want, but know what you’re doing.

A shrooms-aided four-word summary of WE ARE EATING THE EARTH: “Trees are good, man.”

Cattle’s big climate problem isn’t farting too much methane, it’s using too much land, 10 times as much as pigs or poultry. Beef uses half of our ag land to produce 3% of our calories. When we eat beef, WE ARE EATING THE EARTH.

AI isn’t sucking rivers dry. Neither is your lawn. It’s agriculture. Farms use three quarters of our fresh water. That’s why the Colorado River is parched. That’s why the aquifers under California are overpumped. We’re drinking the earth, too.

More from me on @thedailyshow.com :  No, eating local grass-fed beef doesn’t make you an eco-hero. What matters is what you eat (beef is bad) and how efficiently it’s grown (grass-fed is not). Agriculture that makes less food per acre eats more of the earth.

I riffed about my slightly hypocritical but mostly eco-friendly diet on @thedailyshow.com .
I explained why beef is worse than dairy, and why when perfect isn't on the menu, better is better than worse.