Food

The choices we make

The dietary choices we humans make have a very large impact on the Earth's natural resources.  These are choices that we all make, every day.  This is powerful, because it means that everyone of us has the power to make impactful choices every day.  Even if our individual choices seem small, together we absolutely make a difference.  

Here are a few resources that can help you determine the carbon impact of the foods you eat.

Plant, Animal, Lab Grown...?

Plant vs Animal

Lab Grown Meat

Plant-Based Substitutes

You may not be ready for a "Vegan 4 Life" tattoo, but every time you put a plant in your mouth instead of an animal, you're helping lower overall greenhouse emissions.  So come on, let's save the world one bite at a time!

Plant-Based and Vegan Recipe Sources

Plant-Based and Vegan Brands Worth Trying

Organic or Not?

Hands On Organic Learning Opportunities

Local/Seasonal?

Emissions

Carbon

Click the Food & Carbon button to learn more about how our food production system both emits and sequesters carbon - which food choices cause the most emissions, vs which practices sequester the most.

Methane

Methane from Food Production

Methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas between 20-28x stronger than carbon dioxide, though it is shorter-lived in our atmosphere. There are natural sources of methane such a swamps and bogs, but also seriously less natural sources like the leaky fossil fuel infrastructure that we have scattered all over the world.

If we focus in on our food production we find that the biggest contributors from our diets (listed from greatest to lesser) are:

A Harvard report published in 2018, found that "shifting U.S. beef production to exclusively grass-fed, pastured systems would require 30% more cattle just to keep up with current demand and production levels, and that the average methane footprint per unit of beef produced would increase by 43% due to the slower growth rates and higher methane conversion rates of grass-fed cattle. This would increase the U.S.’s total methane emissions by approximately 8%, according to the researchers."

Impact by Location & Food Type

Evidence has surfaced that the food production of 5 countries out ways the ecological impact of other countries "... India, China, the United States, Brazil, and Pakistan—account for 43.8% of the global cumulative impact of producing food... 

Of this, terrestrial food production contributes a larger cumulative pressure than do aquatic sources of food. And yet, despite providing just 1.1% of global nourishment, food from the ocean causes a surprisingly large 10% of cumulative environmental pressure, due to the effects of habitat disturbance, the researchers found.  

... Beef production is widely accepted as being the worst for the planet because of the associated emissions—but when factoring in water use and pollution, pig farming actually has the larger cumulative environmental footprint. Similarly, some types of fish pose bigger environmental pressures than chicken does."

The Impact of Transporting Food

Most people know that our food costs us in emissions, water, and fertilizer, but there are some other issues that people are often unaware of.

GHG Emissions

According to this Oxford report, the majority of livestock emissions are from feed production and the animals themselves, with only 6% of their lifetime emissions coming from transport and processing.

As you can see from the graph below, animal products tend to produce much larger quantities of GHG emissions than plant-based foods.

Live Shipping's Trail of Manure

"The stench emanating from livestock carriers is legendary amongst seafarers. Some joke that they can be smelt before they appear on the ship’s radar."

"Carried by the oldest saltwater fleet, about 115 vessels in total, many millions of animals have been exported around the world by sea. The number of cattle exported live from Australia alone each year has varied between 620,000 and 1,310,000 for the last 10 years. The cattle are shipped to markets in Asia, the Middle East, Europe and Russia."

"The excrement has a high water content and is considered benign. It is treated like sewage under Marpol Annex IV and doesn’t need to be treated before dumping far from shore.


Some masters like excrement washwater to be released at night, when it won’t be captured on satellite images, says Dr Lynn Simpson, an Australian veterinarian who has made 57 live export voyages ranging from around 10 to 30 days’ duration. In her experience, masters take a very cautious approach to Marpol Annex IV regulations which, simply put, state that the excrement can be discharged at a distance of more than 12 nautical miles from the nearest land at a moderate rate when the ship is en route and proceeding at not less than four knots."

"On voyages of more than 10 days, ships are washed down every three to five days. On big ships, this operation can take three days to complete. There are no shore-based facilities to accept livestock excrement, so the only excrement on board that reaches shore is that stuck to the animals themselves.

Simpson was a well-respected live export veterinarian when she was hired by the Australian government to submit a report on the trade in 2012 after media reports of live export cruelty. She believes that the report was generally bland, except in one respect: It was full of pictures – some showing animals covered in excrement."

- https://maritime-executive.com/features/live-export-following-the-effluent-trail


Transmission Risk of Zoonoses (Animal to Human Sickness)

All this feces plus handling sick, infected animals poses a growing danger to humans working with or consuming the animals, as wells as wildlife who live in the areas where livestock waste or even corpses are thrown overboard. 

These dangers include:

Livestock Drugs in the Water from Livestock Corpses & Manure

"Australian veterinarians are required to treat sick and injured animals, and so excrement and carcasses can contain traces of treatment drugs. The residue from one drug commonly used, Oxytetracycline, can be present in the animal’s body for 90 days, and Australia’s meat export industry must observe and declare a withholding period of 90 days between medicating an animal with this drug and human consumption. More typically though, residues from other drugs dissipate in less than two weeks."

"Carcasses are thrown overboard whole, in part, or after being mechanically processed in equipment such as a grinder. Based on death rates for 2015, Australian live export voyages would have resulted in approximately 12,500 sheep and 1,300 cattle carcasses being disposed of at sea last year."

...

"“Unless post-mortems are conducted, the usual practice is to throw all dead sheep overboard entire. You can often watch them bobbing on the water’s surface in the ships wake as you steam on.”

Simpson says that whole, slit or part carcasses don’t sink straight away, and when they do, they can bloat and rise to the surface again."

- https://maritime-executive.com/features/live-export-following-the-effluent-trail

Grants

International

North America

USA