From Farm to Table and Back Again
George Steinmetz journeys into the food industry for his new book, "Feed the Planet"

In the industrialized world, less than 2 percent of the population is involved in food production, leaving most of us in the dark about how our food is grown and produced. That is in part by design: There are certain aspects of the food system that large-scale growers don’t want us to see. Just ask aerial photographer George Steinmetz. In 2013, he was charged with criminal trespass after a feedlot operator in Kansas called the cops on him for buzzing overhead in a motorized paraglider (essentially a flying lawn chair).
During the course of a decade, Steinmetz traveled to 36 countries across six continents to get a clearer picture of the stunning efficiency, and at times horrifying reality, of industrialized food systems. The shrimp on your plate, the lettuce in your salad—just about any staple of your diet can be traced back to its source in Feed the Planet: A Photographic Journey to the World’s Food (Abrams Books, 2024). In a series documenting deforestation in the Amazon, a photo shows vast areas of rainforest mowed down to raise cattle for beef; in another photo, smoke saturates a forest in the process of being burned to plant soybeans for vegetable oil. At a huge dairy farm in Wisconsin, rows of some 4,000 tiny hutches contain thousands of calves in cramped, inhumane conditions to produce milk. In Spain, nearly 128 square miles of greenhouses at the Mar de Plástico (“sea of plastic”) produce many of Europe’s winter fruits and vegetables, along with 30,000 tons of plastic waste each year.
The more we know about where our food comes from, the better choices we can make—for ourselves and the planet. “We all vote with a fork three times a day,” Steinmetz writes.