By Paola Di Stefano
Food is memory and connection. It is the scent of a simmering pot, laughter around a crowded table, and shared student meals laden with hope and uncertainty about the future. Yet beneath these intimate moments lies an unsettling truth: the very food we grow, consume, and waste today is wrecking the planet that sustains our generation and those to come. What feels deeply personal at the dinner table is a political story far larger than any kitchen.
Five years ago, the EU’s Farm to Fork Strategy promised to make Europe’s food system “fair, healthy and environmentally friendly,” with specific targets to halve pesticide use, cut fertilizers, expand organic farming, and promote healthier diets. Five years later, most of these ambitions have vanished from the EU agenda. Amid farmers’ protests, pressure from agribusiness lobbies, and shifting political winds, the European Commission has abandoned or delayed flagship reforms, softening food waste reduction goals and “simplifying measures”, a diplomatic euphemism for rolling back oversight for farmers and scrapping pesticide regulation.
Europe once pledged to transform its food system. Now it is choosing to look away, leaving those who already bear, and will continue to bear, the consequences of inaction to pay the price. As bluntly noted by Politico, “Europe has lost its appetite for change”, but our generation, those born into the climate emergency, cannot afford that luxury. With the planet under extraordinary pressure and a food system that rewards excess over equity, the promises of the Farm to Fork Strategy cannot be allowed to disappear quietly. Europe must decisively rethink its food system to meet urgent social and ecological imperatives.
Pushing the Planet to its Limits
Despite scientific consensus on the European food system being one of the continent’s most powerful engines of ecological destruction, political reality has moved in the opposite direction. Agriculture accounts for roughly one-third of the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions, with livestock alone producing nearly 70% of those emissions. Fertilizer runoff poisons rivers and contributes to biodiversity loss, while intensive farming degrades soils and weakens resilience to climate shocks. And then there is waste: Around 58 million tons of food vanish into bins each year across the EU, wasting resources and nutrients. Given these data, Europe cannot credibly talk of climate targets while its food system quietly consumes them. The latest 2025 EAT-Lancet Report now warns that global food systems are now humanity’s largest driver of planetary boundary transgressions. They are not only contributing to environmental decline; they are pushing the Earth past its limits, from climate change and biodiversity loss to freshwater depletion and nutrient pollution. In other words, most of what we produce and eat is destabilizing the very foundations that make our lives possible.
A System of Inequality
The EU’s broken food system is not only a story of environmental failure, but it is also a story of deep inequality woven into every link of the chain. The burdens and benefits of Europe’s food economy are distributed with stark imbalance. As reported by the European Environmental Bureau, the wealthiest 30% of the global population consume disproportionately resource-intensive diets, driving the majority of food-system emissions and land use, while millions still struggle to afford fresh, healthy food. Patterns of overconsumption, on the rationale of the Western Diet, coexist with the reality that over 36 million citizens struggle to afford a wholesome meal every other day.
European agricultural policy often reinforces rather than repairs these disparities. The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), despite reforms, still channels the majority of subsidies toward the largest and most intensive producers: those with the biggest landholdings, the most chemical-dependent systems, and the strongest lobbying power. The top 20% of beneficiaries receive the large majority of direct payments, leaving small farmers fighting over crumbs while competing in markets tilted against them.
This imbalance ripples through rural communities, where land consolidation drains local economies, and independent farmers face growing debt or exit. Meanwhile, much of Europe’s agricultural workforce depends on migrant laborers who often face unsafe working conditions, poor housing, and wages that fail to meet basic living standards. They constitute the invisible backbone of the EU’s agriculture, propping up a system celebrated for its “efficiency”, but fundamentally built on inequality.
There Is Hope
Yet even in this bleak landscape, a different future is still within reach. The 2025 EAT-Lancet Report highlights that rapid changes in diets, farming practices, and food waste could deliver trillions in global health, economic, and environmental gains. The science is clear. The solutions are known; what is missing is political ambition.
The EU could still revive the ambition of Farm to Fork. It could use the tools it already holds to reshape the food system at its core. Instead, it hesitates, standing at a fork in the road, letting its food system quietly consume the planet.
And the price of this hesitation will not be paid by those who made the decisions, but by those who had no say in them. The current generation, and the ones that follow, will inherit the consequences of a system they did not design.
If Europe truly wants to lead on climate, fairness, and the future, it must rethink its menu. Because those moments around a table, the simmering pot, the laughter, the shared meals, need a world healthy enough to sustain them. The food that brings us together should not be the same food that tears the planet apart.
Image source: Generated by ChatGPT (header)
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