Food carbon rating system could help reduce our diet's environmental impact

[Mighty AU]

Calculating the environmental impact of each item of food we eat is easier said than done.

Key points:
Consumers greatly underestimate the energy cost of their food
Researchers found consumers bought less beef when emissions labels were present
Carbon labelling needs to be easily understandable to avoid information overload

A chicken on the table at Christmas in South Australia will have a smaller carbon footprint than its counterpart raised in Queensland — mostly because they're fed different feedstock.

And while some people choose to make broad changes like opting for a vegetarian or vegan diet, there are still big variations between the environmental effects of different vegetables and vegetarian food products.

Fertilisers used in farming, the distance to market, packaging, feedstocks and farming methods are all part of the complex web that determines the environmental footprint of our food.

But shoppers can't be expected to investigate every item in their trolley before they get to the checkout.

So what if the carbon footprint of our food was clearly labelled, similar to, say, the energy star rating we have on our appliances? Would that encourage consumers to eat a lower emissions diet?

Findings of a study published today in Nature Climate Change suggest it would.

University of Technology Sydney consumer psychologist Adrian Camilleri and colleagues at Duke University in the US asked more than 500 participants to estimate the emissions use, or "energy budget", of growing or manufacturing different foods.

As a point of reference, they were also asked to guess the energy used in an hour by different household appliances.

Almost universally, the participants greatly underestimated food's energy budget — especially that of red meat.

"Food is basically underestimated, even more so than all of the appliances," Dr Camilleri said.

"The true carbon footprint ratio between the beef and the vegetable soup was about 10. Beef was about 10 times as bad, [but] without a [carbon] label, people thought beef was about twice as bad."

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Read more at Food carbon rating system could help reduce our diet's environme.. and https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0354-z

[Tinter]

That seems like a great idea. If it could lower the demand for beef it would probably help quite a lot.

[LoneWolf_Recon]

Furthermore it could encourage more sustainable production of the meat industry. Blanket bans are never enough, if you want industry change its got to be a two pronged effort from both informed consumers and govt bans, carbon budgets and incentives.

[🅱️🅰️LLS. ➿]

Very interesting idea