Framing the Planetary and Calculating the Complex: The Controversies, Overflows, and Floods of the EAT-Lancet Planetary Diet

Data-intensive methods have become vital for getting epistemic purchase on global socioecological issues. Yet these methods are never fully insulated against contestation precisely because they seek to represent things that are so large and complex. This article is about these contestations and what they reveal about knowledge politics, today. It focuses on the EAT-Lancet report and its Planetary Diet. By promising to have comprehensively mapped the interactions between food and human and environmental health, the EAT-Lancet Commission attracted a flood of contestations. The concept of the flood is introduced to explore what happens when political, cultural, and scientific interest in the complex, interconnected, and planetary ontology of ecological crisis encounters the epistemologies of data-intensive knowledge production. Building on the language of framing and overflowing, the article shows why complexity and planetarity have become so alluring in science communication strategies, and it interrogates the political economy that determines which representation–reality gaps get to become controversial. The contestations the EAT-Lancet report attracted arose, in part, because of conflicting understandings of complexity. Where the report depicted the food system as a romantic whole, those who challenged its findings did so by attesting to the food system's baroque irreducibility and the pervasiveness of context.