On a warm June morning in 2013, George Steinmetz, ’79, was running at the edge of a crop circle in Finney County, Kan., to catch the wind. The pioneering low-flight photographer was on assignment for National Geographic, documenting food systems, when he strapped himself into his motorized paraglider to get a bird’s-eye view of the Brookover Ranch Feed Yard. But the manager of the cattle feedlot was less than thrilled, and when Steinmetz landed, a sheriff was waiting. Steinmetz was booked into county jail on trespass charges, and his camera equipment, aircraft, and car were confiscated.
His photos of Brookover Ranch (returned to him after he was released) became the catalyst for Feed the Planet: A Photographic Journey to the World’s Food. “[T]he encounter made me realize that there are parts of our food system that some people don’t want us to see,” he writes in the book’s afterword. “I sensed that there was a bigger story.” Steinmetz spent the next 10 years trying to answer a simple question: Where does our food come from? The result is a compendium of more than 300 photos from 36 countries, 27 U.S. states, and five oceans, with accompanying text by journalist Joel Bourne Jr.
The images depict both the beauty and the challenges of producing food for 8 billion people. Take, for example, an open-air grain market in Punjab, India, where small-scale farmers bring their rice to be dried, graded, and sold to government buyers (top). Or a 65-square-mile shrimp farm in Sumatra, Indonesia, where many ponds lie fallow because of poor management (middle). Or some of the 4,000 hutches housing dairy calves in Wisconsin, which produced 32 billion pounds of milk in 2023 (bottom).
“In the industrialized world, less than 2 percent of the people are farmers,” says Steinmetz. He hopes his project helps bridge the gap between those who produce food and those who consume it, so that people are better equipped to evaluate their choices at the grocery store. He believes that a sustainable future will require changes to the way we feed ourselves, but, ultimately, he came away optimistic. “There are a lot of people who say that our food system is broken,” he says. “I think it’s really quite resilient.”
Kali Shiloh is a staff writer at Stanford. Email her at kshiloh@stanford.edu.
