Great Food Transformation? Criticism of the Planetary Health Diet and the Controversial EAT-Lancet Report

The EAT initiative, founded in 2013 in Scandinavia by Gunhild Stordalen and Johan Rockström, emerged as a hub for global food systems transformation. At the time, Stordalen was married to Norwegian billionaire Petter Stordalen, and Rockström led the Stockholm Resilience Centre. The initiative gained prominence with its inaugural Food Forum in Stockholm in 2014, supported by high-profile figures like the Prince of Wales and Bill Clinton. In 2016, with funding from the Wellcome Trust, the EAT-Lancet Commission was established. Led by Harvard’s Walter Willett, it introduced the Planetary Health Diet, advocating for a semi-vegetarian way of eating at the global level.

EAT’s ambitions extend beyond dietary guidance. Positioning itself as a ‘Davos for food’, it seeks to ‘add value to business and industry’ and ‘shape the political agenda’. Its ties to the World Economic Forum (WEF) are well documented. Gunhild Stordalen graduated as a WEF Young Global Leader in 2015 and maintains close connections with WEF President Børge Brende, a former Norwegian minister and Bilderberg steering committee member. The WEF has been a key supporter of EAT, aligning its Great Food Transformation with the WEF’s Great Reset vision. José María Figueres Olsen, ex-CEO of the WEF and an ‘EAT alumnus’, links the initiative to his sister, Christiana Figueres, former UNFCCC Executive Secretary. Known for her rabiate anti-meat opinions, such as her proposal to exclude meat-eaters from restaurants, Christiana has various ties with organizations within EAT’s broader network, including the World Resources Institute, Unilever, Impossible Foods, and We Mean Business.

As the dietary arm of the WEF, EAT aims to transform diets within a ‘Transition Decade’ (2020–2030). Its ‘portfolio of solutions’ include plant-based imitation foods, lab-grown meat, mycoprotein, and insects. These 'alternative protein' options have often been highlighted by the WEF as ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ technologies for food systems transformation, together with nutrigenetics, blockchain, and virtual reality. Through public-private partnerships, modeled on Davos, EAT and its partners managed to influence policies like the EU’s Green Deal and the Nordic Nutrition Recommendations. However, its vision for transforming dietary habits has faced major challenges. Reports suggest that consumer resistance and market dynamics have hindered adoption with alternative proteins being mostly rejected by global consumers. In response, aiming to revitalize its mission with fresh capital injections and targeted media campaigns, EAT-Lancet 2.0 was launched in October 2026. One of its main aims is to become an ‘IPCC for food’, an idea which has been circulating within the WEF since 2017, where it was propagated by Davos man Joachim von Braun.

EAT collaborates extensively with specific entities within the United Nations, such as WHO and UNEP. This collaboration is facilitated by WEF's strategic partnership with the UN to push forward the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. This partnership represents nothing short of a corporate capture of the UN, shifting decision-making power towards corporate-led initiatives.

Major agri-food corporations have aligned with the WEF/EAT vision to reform diets by promoting ‘alternative proteins', viewing it as a market expansion opportunity. In 2017, EAT partnered with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development through the FReSH initiative. Additionally, the Food and Land Use Coalition (FOLU) was created, with substantial backing from companies like Unilever and Yara, to roll out the EAT-Lancet agenda.

EAT also garnered support from vegan-tech investors, such as prince Khaled bin Alwaleed, and the Good Food Institute, the leading lobby group for vegan-tech industries. Together, they maintain close ties with FAIRR, founded by vegan Jeremy Coller with the aim to end ‘industrial livestock’ and serving as a financial pressure group to force business into ‘plant-based’ markets.

The alignment between EAT and the WEF, UN, and WBCSD became very clear during the 2021 UN Food Systems Summit. The Summit faced strong criticism for its corporate dominance, lack of transparency in leadership selection, and concerns over the expertise and funding of the appointed leaders. Various farmer groups, scientsts, and even UN special rapporteurs, have argued that the Summit represented a hostile takeover by transnational corporations, philanthrocapitalists, and Davos.

EAT's Stordalen was appointed to chair the Summit's Action Track 2, which focused on promoting 'sustainable diets'. Her stated aim was 'to take full advantage of the Summit', as to drive the 'far-reaching changes that the world now desperately needs'. The World Health Organization served as the Track's anchoring agency. Francesco Branca, a WHO director and EAT-Lancet Commissioner, is a known advocate of a Davos-style 'reset' of the food systems, including a drastic reduction in meat. 

Action Track 2 was characterized by a strong anti-livestock stance, featuring a vegan advocate as Youth Vice-Chair, the CEO of 50by40—an activist umbrella organization with the mission to halve global livestock herds by 2040—as Civil Society Leader, and various animal rights advocates among its workstream leaders and supportive scientists. To give a seat to the vegan-tech lobby, the Good Food Institute was tasked with leading the 'innovation pillar' across all action tracks.

The Planetary Health Diet heavily restricts animal source foods, calling red meat an ‘unhealthy’ food like sugar, and advocates for alternative proteins. In contrast to what is commonly assumed, its semi-vegetarian composition (with a vegan option) is primarily rooted in assumptions about human health, as to minimize chronic disease, rather than environmental considerations.

Conceptually, EAT’s Great Food Transformation traces back to earlier initiatives for great transition schemes proposed by EAT’s strategic partners. Examples include the 'Great Transformation' suggested by the German Advisory Council on Global Change, the Tellus Institute’s 'Great Transition', and the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset’ and ‘Great Transformation’.

The EAT Foundation aggressively pushes for its global ‘Great Food Transformation’ by advocating top-down dietary interventions, an approach which clashes with the bottom-up governance that is usually favoured in developmental studies. Historically, such sweeping, utopian policies have led to control, exploitation, and self-justification, prioritizing structure over people and nature. EAT-Lancet dismisses individual consumer choice, arguing that soft measures will not achieve the needed food system overhaul. It calls for hard policy levers, like restricting dietary options, backed by partners like the World Wildlife Fund and World Resources Institute. The proposed interventionist toolbox includes marketing campaigns, nudging through appealing plant-based product names, digital behavior change tools, supermarket display tweaks, 30-day vegan challenges, and revised dietary guidelines. Harsher measures include mandatory nutritional warnings, ‘sin taxes’, and outright meat bans.

Australia, for instance, is called upon by the EAT-FOLU coaltion to transition to a drastic 91% cut in red meat consumption, redirecting production for export. The C40 Cities initiative, launched at the 2017 EAT Forum, saw 14 global mayors sign the 2019 Good Food Cities Declaration, committing to steer citizens toward the EAT-Lancet diet by 2030, with targets ranging from reduced meat and dairy consumption to ambitious zero-meat and -dairy goals. Some of these cities have already limited meat in public canteens.

EAT-Lancet's Planetary Health Diet may not effectively address chronic diseases as intended and may potentially result in deficiencies. Therefore, it fails to convincingly deliver what it promised, while introducing risk. It has been criticized by various authors, to the point of being called 'science fiction'.

Tied to the Davos public-private partnership model, the EAT-Lancet diet’s promotion raises concerns about corporate overreach and sidestepping public accountability. The initiative has also faced a lot of criticism for neglecting some of the broader nutritional, ecological, cultural, and economic factors. Critics argue that it lacks consideration for the realities of different regions, has an urban middle-class bias, and relies on unrealistic assumptions. The diet is costly, hard to access, and clashes with cultural food preferences, while being unaffordable for many, especially in low-income communities. Its promotion misrepresents countries like India and Indonesia as near-vegetarian, ignoring actual local diets and widespread undernourishment. Environmentally, the diet’s promises fall short. Scaling up nut production could strain water resources, and while it may cut greenhouse gas emissions, it risks increasing water use. It also may worsen biodiversity and fails to consider food system circularity, undermining its sustainability claims.