Ranked: The Foods With the Largest Environmental Impact
Ranked: The Foods With the Largest Environmental Impact
Food and agriculture have a significant impact on our planet, particularly in terms of carbon emissions, water withdrawals, and land use.
That explanation for why dark chocolate is so high seems like a stretch and really casts doubt on all the rest of the information.
all the water use in poore-nemecek 2018 (the source for this chart) is dubious. they treat each end product as though all the inputs were made only for that end product AND as though the inputs wouldnt have been produced (and wasted) anyway as the result of some other process. it has no contextualization of the broader systems of production.
Also like... Cheese is where you take all the valuable stuff out of milk and through away the water that constitutes most of it's mass. Of course it's a poor water to weight ratio because most of the weight of milk is water. But in terms of water usage to available dietary nutrition I can't see it being very different to milk.
It makes the exception for land use change for chocolate, but isn't almost all agricultural land a land use change which contributes? Most soybean and other crops aren't as effective at sequestering carbon as the natural grasslands they took over. Orchards and other crops also took over forests and turned them into pastures and fields.
I don't see them making an exception, just explaining where the impact comes from.
It's informative, but 1kg of beef and 1kg of coffee beans is not a meaningful comparison :D
The absence of palm oil--or any cooking oil--is pretty dubious.
While it's not perfect I think emissions per calorie is a better measurement than emissions per kg (even more importantly for making comparisons of water usage.)
This infographic brought to you by the oil industry™
Please focus on this infographic and curbing your own satisfaction, so we can continue to be the biggest polluter AND make money hand over fist.
I mean not really.
Live stock accounts for 60% of land usage, but only 2% of calories consumed. Much of that land is growing feed for cattle. They eat millions more calories in grain than is harvested.
Meat is just such a luxury with how many resources it uses. Like the world doesn't have enough space for everyone to eat meat like the US does.
It also feels very cruel to grow so much feed for cows when people are starving.
But people love Meat and have it part of their culture so people won't stop no matter what.
So fingers crossed for lab grown meat so this debate can just vanish.
I'm a biologist and I fully agree with the infographic, unless you have any actual data points that disprove it to share with us.
This can be misleading. For instance: raising dairy cattle in lush and water rich areas with no or limited dependency on fossil water is very different than dairy cattle being raised in the desert with 90% of the food being trucked in and the cheese also being made in the desert using extremely limited fresh water.
Beef is certainly super high impact, generally but how we go about it super matters.
It excludes the fact that animal-based farming contributes greatly to water pollution, too.
Methane with cow-based agriculture too
The original study does show water pollution, even going so far as to split it between acidification and eutrophication.
and water consumption as well, beef cattle consume enormous quantities of water in the form of hay
If fish and prawn use so much water, we should figure out how to raise them aeroponically.
Lets focus on billonaires using their luxury private jets first then we can worry about going after things that feed people
Why not both? This is something that each individual can change by themselves. And it's not hard.
Mainy due to the fact that when trying to stop agriculture or food production it puts the blame on indivisuals who can't afford to change their habits or lifestyles i do know that some are able to change and live differently however those changes for others can lead to large amounts of stress, normally people will correlate the stress of this change to the idea of climate change which causes them to reject the idea of it completely (think of the most stubborn person you know and what they would do if you told them to not do something because of a thing they can't immediately see)
The reason i say that going after billionaires and their jets is more important is because its something that a large amount of people can agree with which means that we can get momentum on that movement better, itll cause stress to less people which means less pushback and the amount of pollution that comes from their jets is absolutely massive like its insane how bad iirc
This isn't saying that we shouldn't work on ways to make farming more ecofriendly (because more ecofriendly actually benefits everyone in the long run not just due to the effects on the environment but it also helps the food taste better and grow more) although it is saying that if we keep blaming individuals and their miniture actions itll just turn more people over to climate denialism
"lets focus on this thing im not responsible for and wont do anything about so we dont have to focus on the thing my actions directly affect and I also wont do anything about "
Does this include shipping? For example coffee does not grow in Europe and needs to be shipped. Even more so for fruits.
The original study does include shipping. You can even see it divided out here.
I get the point of the guide. However, it’s kind of funny and obvious the fish and prawns would be in the top 5 consumers of water. I would expect nothing less.
I was like where the hell is chicken... then saw "poultry"
Why is soy not mentioned? Not all soy is turned into tofu.
Pork and chicken it is then!
truth is, veganism reduces the use of over 50% of farmland in the United States.
Why/how does cheese use so much water?
I'm betting it correlates with the water consumption of dairy cows. I think they are using the whole production needs from nothing to final product.
This, and also a lot of milk is needed to make cheese.
Because they are judging the water use by final weight and you make cheese by removing the water from milk.
