The Atlantic
- Annie Lowrey
But two simple changes can help.
|
Getty
|
What’s for dinner?
On a planet wracked by rising seas, expanding deserts, withering biodiversity,
and hotter temperatures, that’s a fraught question to answer. Food production
accounts for
roughly a quarter
of the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions, and scientists have found that limiting
global warming will be impossible without significant changes to
how the world eats. At the same time, climate change is threatening the world’s food supply, with
land and water being
exploited
at an “unprecedented” pace.
Reforming the food system to save the planet is going to require new corporate
practices, and new laws and regulations at the national and international
levels. But individual consumer behaviors matter as well—more than you might
think. Your diet is likely one of your biggest sources of climate emissions. But
what should you
do? Eat locally? Get your food from small-scale
farmers? Choose organics and fair trade? Avoid processed foods? Eat seasonally?
The choices are many; the stakes are high. But experts on land use, climate
change, and sustainable agriculture told me that two habits tower above all
others in terms of environmental impact. To help save the planet, quit wasting
food and eat less meat.
The conservation nonprofit Rare
analyzed
a sweeping set of climate-change mitigation strategies in 2019. It found that
getting households to recycle, switch to LED lighting and hybrid vehicles, and
add rooftop solar systems would save less than half the carbon emissions
combined than would reducing food waste and adopting a plant-based
diet.
Let’s begin with the role of food waste. Americans waste a lot of food. Nearly
one-third of it, in fact. More than 130 billion pounds a year, worth roughly $160 billion. We
throw away enough food to close our own
“meal gap”
eight times over. Food is the single biggest component of our country’s
landfills, and the average American sends more than 200 pounds of food there every year.
More than 1,250 calories per person a day, or more than 140 trillion calories a
year, get tossed in the garbage.
Households, not restaurants or schools or corporate cafeterias, are the dominant
wasters. The problem is worse in the United States than in most other countries,
and it has worsened over time. When you toss a spoiled chicken breast or moldy
tomato into the trash, you’re wasting a greenhouse-gas-intensive product. You’re
also sending it to a landfill, where it will emit methane.
Addressing food waste would be low-hanging fruit: The country could save money,
emit less carbon into the atmosphere, alleviate the burden on landfills, reduce
the number of animals subjected to life on a factory farm, and address its
hunger crisis just by eating all the food it makes. Households consuming more of
what they buy, and thus buying less, would have a major effect on the whole food
system. Food suppliers would produce less to meet the country’s more efficient
demand. Supermarkets would stock less food. Fewer trucks would need to run from
plant to store. Fewer refrigerators would be needed in stores and industrial
facilities to keep groceries cold. Fewer cows would fill up feedlots. Fewer
acres of corn and soy would be grown to feed them.
How to do it? For one, get wise about expiration labels and quit throwing out
perfectly good food. Research shows that
nearly all Americans
misinterpret date labels and toss their groceries out prematurely, for fear of
food poisoning, and understandably so. Retailers and production companies use 50
different
Use By–type labels, and none is
federally regulated, except for those on infant formula.
Sell By stamps tend to be for inventory
management, and have nothing to do with food safety;
Best If Used By and
Use By stamps tend to be about freshness and food
quality, not whether you are about to enjoy a serving of mycotoxins. As a
general point, most food is safe to eat as long as there is no evident spoilage,
such as visible mold or an off smell. “Use your senses,” says Yvette Cabrera of
the Natural Resources Defense Council, the conservation nonprofit, noting that
those senses were refined through millennia of natural selection in no small
part to help us figure out whether food is safe to eat.
Experts also point to a series of simple,
old-fashioned techniques
households can use to ensure that they eat more of the food they buy. They
amount to thinking like your Depression-era forebears, pretty much. Figure out
appropriate portion sizes; eat your leftovers; store food in appropriate
containers and at the right temperature; prepare and freeze perishables instead
of letting them linger and go bad; and shop in your refrigerator and cabinet
before you hit the store.
And when you’re at the store, there is one dietary change to consider that beats
all others in terms of its climate impact. It is not eating locally or
seasonally. It is not eating organic or fair-trade. It is not eating unprocessed
foods or avoiding big-box and fast-food retailers. It is eating less meat.
Roughly three-quarters of
the world’s farmland
is used to pasture livestock or raise crops to feed that livestock. That
contributes to deforestation, destroys the planet’s natural carbon sinks, erodes
the planet’s
biodiversity, and uses up fresh water.
The main,
mooing offender is beef. Cattle are responsible for roughly two-thirds of the livestock sector’s
greenhouse-gas emissions, while beef and dairy products are responsible for about one-tenth of global
emissions overall. Gram for gram,
beef produces
roughly eight times more greenhouse-gas emissions than farmed fish or poultry,
12 times more than eggs, 25 times more than tofu, and even more compared with
pulses, nuts, root vegetables, bananas, potatoes, bread, or maize.
Beef is so bad for two reasons, Michael Clark, a scholar of
food systems
and health at the University of Oxford, explained to me. The first is that it
takes a lot of inputs to produce beef as an output: about 20 kilograms of corn
and soy protein to produce one kilogram of beef, he said. The second is that
cows produce methane as they digest their food. “Other types of animals don’t do
that,” he said. “And methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon
dioxide.”
Trading your rib eyes and cheesesteaks for lentils and tofu is one of the best
things you can do as a consumer for the environment; if all Americans did, the
country would
be roughly halfway to hitting its Paris Agreement targets. Still, the all-or-nothing way the choice is often presented is a mistake.
There is enormous acreage between the Atkins diet, or even the meat-heavy diet
of the average American, and full-on veganism, which remains a niche lifestyle
choice that few follow for long. Better all Americans cut meat consumption by 40
percent than 3 percent of Americans cut it out completely. Experts encourage
taking small, meaningful steps to reduce your meat consumption, and trying to
find some joy in doing it. Participate in
Meatless Monday; try learning to cook dishes from a plant-heavy cuisine you like; offer a
vegetarian option at work events; opt for dishes where meat plays a supporting,
rather than leading, role.
After wasting less food and eating less meat, all other changes a person might
make are marginal, experts said, among them eating locally, organically, and
seasonally. Moreover, the
climate impact of those food choices is in
many cases contradictory. “I work in food, and it’s confusing for me,” Cabrera,
of the NRDC, told me. “Is this lettuce better than this lettuce? Consumers are
faced with so many choices, and it is really hard to know.”
Humanely raised, local meat, for instance, can produce more emissions than meat
coming from a concentrated industrial operation, Clark told me. Cows in
concentrated animal-feeding operations
are generally slaughtered at 12 to 18 months of age, while cows raised
exclusively on pastures typically live twice as long. “The cow that lives for
longer is going to emit more methane over the course of its lifespan,” he said,
though he added that there were still compelling reasons to opt for the local
beef.
Similarly, growing a given amount of organic produce usually requires more
emissions and acres of land than growing the same amount using conventional
farming methods. One study
conducted
in Sweden, for instance, showed that organic peas and wheat have a bigger
climate impact than their conventionally farmed cousins.
That said, when it comes to the emissions related to shipping food around the
world, experts argue that—surprisingly—local is not always better. There’s a
certain uncanny decadence to eating Peruvian avocados and Chinese grapes in the
dead of winter, or opening a bottle of French Beaujolais or a package of
Scottish smoked salmon at will. But transporting food around the world tends to
make up only a
small share
of a given product’s total greenhouse-gas emissions. What you are eating and how
it was farmed is far more important than how it got to you, and imported food
typically has a low carbon impact.
For all that, experts said there are good reasons to opt for organic, locally
produced, seasonal food, even if it might not be as efficient to produce, or
might not have the lowest greenhouse-gas emissions. Many smaller-scale
operations outside Big Ag produce food without pesticides, without monoculture,
with manure instead of chemical fertilizers, and with respect for biodiversity
and soil health. Those are all important facets of environmental preservation
too.
Complicating things, what’s good for the environment isn’t always what’s good
for animal welfare. When it comes to eating animals, “unfortunately, the cruelty
scale is the flip of the emissions scale,” Leah Garcés, the president of Mercy
for Animals, a nonprofit that advocates for better conditions for animals raised
in industrial environments, told me. A family can easily eat a chicken in a
single night, but might struggle to eat a whole cow over the course of a year.
Moreover, transportation and processing is much rougher on birds, which have
delicate bodies. (Each year, more than 1 million chickens die en route to
slaughter, and half a million are not actually dead when they hit the scalding
tank.) For these reasons, a chicken breast represents much more suffering than a
steak, even though the steak is worse for the planet. But the fact remains: The
fewer animals you eat, the fewer die, and the better off the planet is.
Diets that are good for the planet tend to be good for people too. Research by
Clark and his colleagues has shown that foods associated with good health
generally have low environmental impacts, “indicating that the same dietary
transitions that would lower incidences of noncommunicable diseases would also
help meet environmental sustainability targets.”
Our diets are cooking the planet, and changing them, even in small ways, might
help avert catastrophe. A burger for lunch, a bag of wilted greens in the
trash—these may not be as obviously destructive to the environment as a private
jet or a gas-guzzling car. But they are choices we make daily, and they
matter.
Links
