What Is a Climate Diet?

Conversations around sustainability and climate action continue to gain broad audiences, particularly on social media. The hashtag #sustainablediet has over 60.1k posts alone on Instagram, and there is a wide variety of posts comparing food choices, such as this one, to suggest swapping cow milk for oat milk or salmon for tempeh. These conversations are also spread by “sustainability influencers,” content creators who promote more sustainable lifestyles. But sometimes these definitions about sustainability may be more limiting than  educating.

For example, sustainability as a concept is nuanced and can look different across various communities. For Indigenous and Black communities, sustainability is often tied to food practices that are more in tune to their traditions and cultures, without the overpriced price tag that comes when dominant cultures coopt these practices. Concepts like food sovereignty help promote a more community-focused lens approach and help people understand that sustainable diets aren’t a one-size-fits-all approach.

A Nuanced Approach to Diet Influencing

In its more basic form, sustainable food is nutritious, accessible, makes efficient use of resources in its production, and has minimal or positive environmental impact.

When Brennan Kai, who lives in Florida, decided to no longer follow a vegan lifestyle, she got a lot of pushback from the vegan community, who saw this as a failing on her part for incorporating cheese into her diet. Since then, Kai began creating content that was more nuanced, by showcasing different perspectives and promoting how sustainable diets can look different and yet still be sustainable.

“I live in a tropical climate, and I have access to things a lot of people don’t have, like leafy greens and tropical fruits,” Kai shared in an interview for NPQ,, adding that she wanted to also create content that was accessible to those who didn’t have access to these foods. Through her experience, Kai has come to understand that diet choices often come with privilege. It’s not black or white. So now she tries to stay open and understanding of different diet lifestyles. Kai’s approach is still fairly uncommon (social media content isn’t exactly known for its conciliatory tone), but it is this nuanced approach that has brought her more attention.

These same trends also have another very drastic consequence—the exclusion of Indigenous and diverse communities whose long held traditions, foods, and practices are now being commodified, looked down upon or being made completely inaccessible.

In its more basic form, sustainable food is nutritious, accessible, makes efficient use of resources in its production, and has minimal or positive environmental impact. These trends are what have caused a surge in the organic foods market, boosting sales of organic fruits and products like matcha. But what this rise in popularity doesn’t account for is exactly what Kai faced backlash for, sustainable choices depend on many different factors. Matcha may be sustainable in Japan, but not so much in the United States. What these social media trends don’t account for is the impact that overconsumption has been having on matcha farms, nor the environmental consequences of shipping certain foods halfway across the world.

Yet their influence remains strong on consumers, with research showing that social media trends have continued to sway audiences’ diet choices and their understanding of what is sustainable food and what isn’t. These same trends also have another very drastic consequence—the exclusion of Indigenous and diverse communities whose long held traditions, foods, and practices are now being commodified, looked down upon, or being made completely inaccessible. From foraging and small-scale farming, to growing and relying on seasonal produce, a growing number of organizations and advocates across the United States are challenging the popular narrative—wanting to bring a more diverse and inclusive approach to what sustainable foods really mean.

When “Sustainable” Becomes Limiting

“One of the things that I think a lot about in my own research is how we, as influencers share messaging about plant-based eating and sustainable diets. And it really doesn’t include any consideration of home-prepared, home-produced food, or wild-caught and foraged foods. Like those are not part of the discussion that we have here in the United States, but they’re really important for many people, especially…in the United States, especially in a rural context,” said Emily Belarmino, assistant professor in Nutrition and Food Sciences and director of the Food Systems program at the University of Vermont, in an interview with NPQ.

Professor Meredith Niles explained, in a conversation with NPQ, that cancel culture has made it all too easy to villainize people and their actions, so certain approaches to food are immediately called unsustainable without even understanding where they’re coming from. Niles is a professor of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Environment and Society at Brown University. “Within social media conversations, you hear things like ‘the mediterranean diet is [the] best diet’—and that doesn’t take into account cultures and norms around food,” she said.

The lack of nuance around these conversations also doesn’t consider that, for many people in the United States, limited access and economic pressures mean that the food choices they’re making aren’t always choices at all.

Author Devon Mihesuah, who is an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and a professor at the University of Kansas, told NPQ about the ways in which new diet trends have been impacting Native populations.

“People might believe Natives have access to all the food they need. They do not. Many tribes are in ‘food deserts,’ that is, areas that have only one—or no—adequate grocery store within a 10-mile radius. And even then, many of those stores do not offer fresh produce,” she said, adding, “Natives have extraordinarily high rates of diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, and heart disease brought on because of eating foods brought by the westernization. Without access to their pre-contact foods, their health will continue to decline.”

How Does Food Sovereignty and Sustainability Interrelate?

For many advocates, change isn’t just about sustainability but about building food sovereignty. While the latter also encompasses sustainable beliefs and systems, it equally focuses on social justice and political empowerment. Food sovereignty for many communities ends up being the end goal, which helps them feel empowered over their food culture and choices through sustainable means—for the people and the land. It’s not just about ingredients. 

Mihesuah points out that for Native people to truly have access to food sovereignty, approaches to food systems need to change.

“Ideally, achieving food sovereignty means having control over the production and distribution of one’s desired food products and having access to pre-contact resources. This is not possible without tribal leadership being on board with food sovereignty initiatives. Tribes need to invest in farming of Native crops and raising and processing bison, in educating their people about traditional ways of eating, [and having] the ceremonies associated with food, and proper nutrition,” she said.

Access to local food solutions to sustainability can be difficult, however, which is why organizations like Why Hunger, an organization that supports community-driven solutions to end hunger, focus on empowering the communities that need it most. Kristen Wyman, co-director of Why Hunger’s global movements program, explained that they help small-scale practitioners get the resources needed to support their land and livelihoods. The educational component of the program is individually tailored and focused on training, in what they call the “farmer-to-farmer” approach. The organization’s work also includes technical assistance and support in policymaking spaces.

Such help can go a long way in building the blocks that are needed to uplift communities long left out of the conversation. It’s also what motivated Zappa Montag to start his initiative, Black to the Land, a community-based nonprofit dedicated to instilling ecological principles, based in the San Franscisco Bay Area.

Growing up in the 1980s, Montag was drawn to movements like Protect the Earth but noticed that “one of the harms of the White environmental movement is there’s an emphasis on conservation, but also not on integrating people into the movement,” said Montag in an interview for NPQ.

With his own advocacy work, he hopes to empower a generation of young Black environmentalists to understand a more holistic approach to sustainable food. He pointed out that there is an emerging movement of both Black and Indigenous land reclamation, that focuses on sovereignty rights. A critical part of his work at Black to the Land is setting up local cooperative economic structures and creating initiatives that encourage trading food and labor—a step away from the usual capitalist structure.

For Montag, another important approach includes empowering locals instead of creating tourism initiatives that take away from communities. He gave an example from Mendocino County, where he spent most of his life, where abalone diving and salmon fishing, now heavily controlled by the tourism industry, was traditionally a Native practice that was kept in balance for thousands of years.

The narrative and understanding around sustainability could take a step in the right direction, if influencers could help in reshaping the content they are promoting. By creating more nuanced social media, bringing context into the conversation, food sustainability and sovereignty can uplift customs, practices, and ingredients unique to each situation.

“I’ve realized that when you know nothing about someone’s own unique set of circumstances (financial limitations, food access limitations, mental health concerns, eating disorder behaviors, etc.), you can’t possibly understand why they choose to do what they do. I have spoken at length about the levels of privilege that are required to live certain lifestyles that align with certain ethics. At the end of the day, most people are doing the best that they can with the resources available to them,” Kai wrote looking for understanding, not consensus.