Rationalising planetary relations: The planetary health diet, quantification and multispecies communities

The Planetary Health Diet, proposed in 2019 by the EAT-Lancet Commission, is a response to the entangled crises of food in the Anthropocene: While hundreds of millions of people worldwide suffer from inadequate nutrition and deficiency diseases, the global food industry is contributing to environmental degradation on an unprecedented scale. Based on the concept of planetary boundaries and nutrition science, the EAT-Lancet Commission promotes a ‘universal reference diet’ that is intended to be both healthy for humanity and sustainable for the planet. Interrogating the Planetary Health Diet’s quantitative approach to governing planetary relations, the paper argues that, rather than recognising the nonhuman, multispecies agency of the planetary, it reproduces euro-anthropocentric knowledge frameworks of the Enlightenment that the planetary experience precisely calls into question. Thereby, the Planetary Health Diet ultimately undermines its very goal of mitigating today’s environmental challenges. This article was published open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .