Before

The food products with the most emissions are meat and cheese. Poultry and pork have lower footprints. Converting land into farmland is another large source of pollution, as well as the actual farming process, including emissions from machinery, methane emissions (1) from plants being grown, and emissions from fertilizers.

Humans started eating meat because berries and other things to be gathered were not plentiful enough, and grasslands were plentiful. Some anthropologists cite meat eating as the reason for the large brain size of humans (2).

As incomes rise, meat consumption (3) also rises. We continue to eat meat because we like it, and potentially because we are biologically driven towards calorie dense foods (4). Industrialized Western nations average more than 220 pounds of meat per person per year, whereas the poorest nations eat less than 22 pounds. Despite evidence that lower intake of meats, processed meats, and poultry are linked to reduced risk of cardiovascular disease, the dietary American Guidelines still have meat as a healthy food, suggesting 26 oz of it per week. Special interest lobbying groups such as the American Meat Institute, the National Meat Association, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association continue to press on the USDA to not regulate meat, with some evidence of lobbyists and USDA staff operating in a “revolving door” system (5).

In the 1950s and 1960s, we experienced a significant amount of Green Revolution-esque (6) advancements, which gave us a substantial increase in production of food through enormous productivity gains (7). Things like better fertilizers, synthetic chemicals, advanced irrigation methods all made making more food significantly easier. We had increased food production for a growing population, a decrease in the rate of expansion of farmland, and improved plant immunity and resilience. Unfortunately, some of these advancements came with increased contamination, increased food waste, and more greenhouse gas emissions (8).

Before the past century, technology advances in agriculture also happened, like horticulture (9), which was used throughout the 6th-13th century BC by various groups.

Outside of technological advancements, governments have made several policies to try to implement principles of sustainability. In the European Union, the Common Agricultural Policy started as a way to incorporate agriculture into the single market and provide for food security of all the nations in the EU. It started as a large part of the EU Budget (¾), but has shrank to ⅓ of the budget today. It initially focused on supporting a “rural way of life”, and structurally ensuring the production of food, but has had a shift towards enabling sustainable agriculture goals, with structural aid for farmers conditioned on respect of sustainability goals since 2013 (10).

In the 1950s and 1960s, we experienced a significant amount of Green Revolution-esque advancements, which gave us a substantial increase in production of food through enormous productivity gains. Things like better fertilizers, synthetic chemicals, advanced irrigation methods all made making more food significantly easier. We had increased food production for a growing population, a decrease in the rate of expansion of farmland, and improved plant immunity and resilience. Unfortunately, some of these advancements came with increased contamination, increased food waste, and more greenhouse gas emissions.

Other countries have tried to implement rules to cause sustainability. In 2016, France (11) made a law that forces grocery stores to donate excess food rather than wasting it.

The US has also made attempts at pushing for food sustainability, albeit with less enforcement mechanisms. The 2014 Farm Bill (12) authorized the Conservation Stewardship Program and encourages participants to undertake new conservation activities to build upon existing conservation activities. Over ⅓ of produced food in the US is wasted, and makes up 24% of landfill waste and is the most common material in landfills, and generate significant amounts of greenhouse gas emissions (13) (14).

The USDA also subsidizes (15) food production to the tune of billions of dollars per year. They also operate “Check-off Programs” (16) which help players in the agriculture market to pool together money, and with the support of the USDA, create marketing programs. A notable example is the Got Milk (17) campaign.

Leaders in the food industry have large impacts on the environment. Large companies like Mondelez, Nestle, Unilever, and P&G have operations that cause the burning of forests for plantations for supplies into their products. Their palm oil suppliers had almost 10,000 fire hotspots in Indonesia (18) and worldwide.

Even products that do not seem like they are inherently going to create pollution, such as water bottles, have an extractatory nature on the environment. Nestle plastic water bottles drained water from Arrowhead Springs in California (19) during record droughts and paid only $200 to extract 576,000 gallons of water from White Pine Springs in Michigan (20). Also, they draw about 3 million gallons of water a day in Florida from four spring locations.

Plastic pollution is also a big problem. Across China, India, the Philippines, Brazil, Mexico and Nigeria, CocaCola, Nestlé, PepsiCo and Unilever are responsible for more than half a million tonnes of plastic pollution every year (21) (22) (23). Countries don’t have the capacity to recycle the plastic, so it is burned instead; 4.6 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions are produced from the open burning of Coca-Cola, Nestlé, PepsiCo and Unilever’s plastic pollution (24).