EAT's origins
The EAT initiative, founded in Scandinavia in 2013 by Gunhild Stordalen and Johan Rockström, aims to revolutionize global diets by reducing reliance on animal source foods and partially filling the resulting food gap with ‘alternative proteins’ [see elsewhere]. At that time, Stordalen was married to the Norwegian billionaire Petter Stordalen, whereas Rockström was the executive director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre [Turow-Paul 2016]. The EAT initiative gained momentum with its inaugural Food Forum in Stockholm in 2014, where the Prince of Wales and Bill Clinton voiced support [SRC 2014]. The Forum's mission was to unite 'experts and decision makers who can come together to change the way we eat'. Financial backing from the Wellcome Trust and the Stordalen Foundation in 2016 propelled the initiative forward, leading to the establishment of the EAT-Lancet Commission Rockström et al. 2016; SRC 2016]. Spearheaded by Harvard's Walter Willett, the Commission then proposed a semi-vegetarian Planetary Health Diet [Willett et al. 2019], which rapidly became influential, being backed by the World Economic Forum, World Business Council for Sustainable Development, and United Nations, among others.
The hand of Davos
To revolutionize global diets, EAT operates trough various public-private partnerships, drawing inspiration from the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos [Leroy et al. 2023]. Being a self-declared 'Davos for food', EAT aims to 'add value to business and industry' and 'set the political agenda' [Richert 2014; Turow-Paul 2016]. This connection to Davos is no coincidence. Gunhild Stordalen was appointed as WEF Young Global Leader in 2015 [Eidem 2015], and maintains close ties with WEF's Børge Brende [Sæther 2015], a former Norwegian Minister, ex-chairman of the UN Commission of Sustainable Development [PMNCH], and member of the Steering Committee of the Bilderberg group [Bilderberg Meetings, accessed 03/01/2022]. He joined the WEF in 2008 and became WEF's managing director in 2011 [PMNCH], after he failed to get the position of executive director at UN Environment Programme (UNEP). In 2017, Brende was appointed as WEF's President [WEF]. Unsurprisingly, Davos has shown strong support of EAT. During the 2018 WEF conference in Davos, the EAT Foundation co-organized an event with, among others, Rabobank, the International Food Policy Research Institute, and the Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition [IFPRI 2018]. Following the launch of the EAT-Lancet report in 2019, the WEF stated on its website that 'we all need to go on the planetary health diet to save the world' [WEF 2019]. A few days later, the report was also discussed at the 2019 WEF meeting in Davos, after which it was presented at the UN Headquarters in New York.
WEF's interest in food systems
The World Economic Forum's support for EAT's Great Food Transformation extends beyond mere sympathy. Food system overhaul is a component of the Davos strategy, highlighted in its Great Reset agenda. This includes an interest in the 'Future of Food', closely aligned with WEF's core activity of 'Developing Sustainable Business Models' [WEF 2020]. Convergence with the EAT agenda is unmistakable, both in concept and in practice. José María Olsen Figueres, the former CEO of WEF, is intricately linked to EAT as an 'EAT alumnus' [EAT]. His sister, Christiana Figueres, who is also UNFCCC’s ex-Executive Secretary and has declared to be in favour of expelling meat eaters from restaurants [Vella 2018], has ties to entities within the broader EAT network, such as the World Resources Institute, Unilever, the vegan-tech company Impossible Foods [Business Wire 2021], and business fronts such as Nature4Climate and We Mean Business. Taken together, EAT appears to function as the dietary arm of WEF, aiming to effect dietary change within a 'Transition Decade' (2020-2030) [WEF 2019]. To do so, the EAT/WEF network refers to a 'portfolio of solutions', including mock meat, lab meat, mycoprotein, and insects [WEF 2018a,b, 2020a,b; see also elsewhere]. In 2018, the WEF published 'Innovation with a Purpose: The role of technology innovation in accelerating food systems transformation' in collaboration with McKinsey & Co [Nayyar & Sanghvi 2018; WEF 2018]. Among other high-tech 'Fourth Industrial Revolution' interventions, also involving nutrigenetics, block chain, and virtual reality, the report made a case for 'alternative proteins'. Impossible Foods was cited as an example. A year later, WEF released a white paper on 'Alternative Proteins', prepared by the Oxford Martin School [WEF 2019], as part of its 'Meat: the Future' series.
EAT as public-private partnership
Given EAT's roots in the WEF, it is anticipated that its strategy will mirror the principles of the Davos philosophy. In tandem with WEF's Great Reset agenda, EAT's aim is to catalyse a profound global overhaul of the food system, coined as the Great Food Transformation [Lucas & Horton 2019]. The process is facilitated through high-level public-private partnerships, with support from WEF and close collaboration with NGOs, transnational policy organisations, and multinational corporations. References to EAT's Planetary Health Diet are already being integrated in policy frameworks worldwide to justify a transition to 'plant-based' eating, as evidenced in the EU's Green Deal and Farm-to-Fork strategy [European Commission 2020]. EAT's dietary proposal, therefore, transcends mere theoretical discourse; it should be understood a top-down policy blueprint grounded in the stakeholder capitalism model advocated by Davos [Leroy & Cohen 2019; Leroy & Hite 2020; Leroy et al. 2020, 2023]. Below, some of EAT's major allies will be listed, including factions within the United Nations, major agri-food corporations, and the vegan-tech industry. It will also be discussed how all these players emerged as a single constellation during the 2021 UN Food Systems Summit.
Alliance with the United Nations
To achieve its objectives, EAT frequently collaborates with factions within the United Nations, exemplified by the inclusion of WHO director Francesco Branca in its EAT-Lancet Commission. Additionally, EAT receives support from UNEP [UNEP 2019], which has gone so far as to label meat as 'the world's most urgent problem' while bestowing the highest environmental award of the UN upon vegan-tech companies Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods [UNEP 2018]. This close interaction with the UN is likely facilitated under the patronage of WEF. In bolstering its transnational influence, WEF has established an official partnership with the UN to accelerate the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development [WEF 2019]. This 'strategic alliance' has faced criticism for what some view as a 'disturbing corporate capture of the UN' [FIAN 2020], resulting in a 'public-private UN' where the decisions of governments could be made 'secondary to multistakeholder led initiatives in which corporations would play a defining role' [Gleckman 2019]. Urgent global challenges, such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and the COVID-19 pandemic are leveraged to create a sense of urgency [WEF 2019], with EAT's emphasis on a broken food system seamlessly aligning with this strategy.
Alliance with agri-food corporations
Some major agri-food corporations have openly embraced the WEF/EAT vision of dietary reform, seeing the radical restriction of animal source foods and their replacement by 'alternative proteins' (aka, 'food from factories') as an opportunity to tap into new market segments and further consolidate their already significant control over the food system. In 2017, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) formalized a partnership with EAT, known as Food Reform for Sustainability and Health (FReSH) [EAT; WBCSD; Coleman 2017]. This collaboration was announced during the Third Stockholm Food Forum, which aimed to 'bring science, policy and business together' [SRC 2016]. WBCSD participation in the Forum was focused on sharing progress on FReSH and exploring further collaboration among 'stakeholders across science and academia, policy-makers, business and consumer groups' [WBCSD 2017]. The WBCSD serves as an industry lobbying platform, representing various global agri-food corporations. FReSH has been characterized as a 'business-led initiative designed to accelerate transformational change in global food systems', bringing together 30+ companies, including leading food multinationals such as Nestlé, Danone, Unilever, Kellogg Company, and PepsiCo. These affiliated multinationals been actively promoting a transition to 'plant-based' eating [e.g., Pointing 2017; Wood 2018; Hyslop 2019], sometimes with strong anti-meat overtones [Kowitt 2019]. Unilever, for instance, aims to achieve €1bn sales from vegan products by 2027 [Smithers 2020], collaborating with the World Wide Fund for Nature and academia [WWF 2019; Askew 2020]. Also during the 2017 Forum, another multi-million dollar effort linked to EAT was announced: the 'Food and Land Use' Coalition (FOLU). Described as an effort that 'brings together science, business solutions and country implementation plans', FOLU acknowledges 'the invaluable contribution of Unilever, Yara International and the Business and Sustainable Development Commission in nurturing [its] initial development' [FOLU, accessed 02/01/2022].
Alliance with the vegan-tech industry
Because of its generally unsympathetic attitude towards livestock agriculture, EAT also attracted support from investors in vegan-tech who have an interest in animal rights agendas. Examples of vegan investors include Farm Animal Investment Risk and Return (FAIRR) and KBW's founder, prince Khaled bin Alwaleed,the son of a Saudi top investor (prince Alwaleed bin Talal, chairman of Kingdom Holding). FAIRR is an investor company of which the membership and wider supporting network comprises institutional investors managing many trillions in combined assets [Wikipedia 2020; FAIRR 2020]. It was founded in 2015 by Jeremy Coller, a vegan who wishes to 'end factory farming' [Pointing 2018], with the goal to put pressure on food companies to serve more imitation animal source foods [Robinson 2017]. Coller has a seat on the advisory board of the Good Food Institute, the leading lobby group for vegan-tech industries [GFI 2021]. FAIRR often interacts with EAT, as during the 2021 UN Food Systems Summit and the linked 'Rethinking Protein: Accelerating law and policy in the global food system' conference to ‘concentrate on legal mechanisms to transition the food system’ FAIRR 2021]. As a vegan, bin Alwaleed refers to dairy as the 'root of environmental evil' [Halligan 2018] and like Coller is a member of the advisory board of the GFI [GFI 2021]. He is also influential within the EAT network [EAT 2020]. Together with several 'vegan leaders' with ties to GFI as well as with EAT's founder Stordalen, bin Alwaleed attended the Nexus Global Summit at the UN Headquarters in 2018 to discuss 'Next Generation Solutions for a World in Transition' [Flink 2018].
The UN Food Systems Summit
The strategic alignment between the UN and EAT/WEF became particularly notable during the 2021 UN Food Systems Summit. EAT's Gunhild Stordalen was appointed as chair of the Summit's Action Track 2, focusing on 'sustainable diets'. Her stated aim was 'to take full advantage of the Summit' and 'to force the kind of far-reaching changes that the world now desperately needs' [EAT 2020]. The WHO functioned as the Track's 'anchoring agency' [UN 2020]. Francesco Branca, an EAT-Lancet Commissioner and WHO director, had already made it clear that, within the food system, 'everything has to be reset [...] we have to have much smaller amounts of meat on our tables. We need to reset, and we need to adjust. We need the policies, the investments, on the supply side and the consumer side. The WHO will be working on the consumer side' (emphasis added) [Grillo 2020]. Action Track 2 was characterized by an outspoken anti-livestock sentiment, involving a vegan advocate and leader of the youth climate organization Zero Hour International as Youth Vice-Chair [Yeager 2019; UN 2020], the CEO of 50by40, an umbrella organization incorporating vegetarian pressure groups, vegan-tech industries, and animal rights activists, as Civil Society Leader [UN 2020], a vegan activist of the Chinese Good Food Fund as one of the workstream leaders [FT 2020], the founder of Brighter Green, an organization with an animal rights agenda (Mia MacDonald), and an academic from Chatham House and Harvard's Animal Law Department, previously affiliated with the Seventh-Day Adventist University of Loma Linda (Helen Harwatt). Moreover, the Good Food Institute (GFI) had been invited to 'lead the innovation pillar' of Action Track 2 and provide 'influence on the innovation thinking across all five action tracks' [GFI 2021]. Criticism was not only related to the clear anti-livestock bias, but to the Summit setup in general. Farmers, rights groups, and 'special rapporteurs on the right to food' from the UN lambasted the Summit as an opaque takeover by transnational corporations (including producers of ultra-processed foods), philanthrocapitalists, and the WEF [Via Campesina 2020, 2021; Canfield et al. 2021; ETC 2021; Fakhri et al. 2021; Langrand 2021; Nisbett et al. 2021; PCFS 2021; Vidal 2021; Saladino 2021]. How leaders of the Action Tracks were recruited has raised specific concerns because of the lack of transparency, absence of key expertise, and doubts about the origins of the funding [Canfield et al. 2021].
