Many believe a significant way to address #climatechange is to 'eat local,’ but that’s not always true. The impact all depends on the kind of #food + how & where it’s produced.

Some foods require fewer resources (water, energy) in some parts of the world. Season can be important. Overall, transportation has a much lower carbon footprint than land use change. And so on.

So instead of ‘eat local,’ let’s go with ‘eat thoughtfully.’ https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local

@Sheril I'm certainly down with this in principle, but it sounds like a tremendous cognitive load when you think about a three course meal or, inordinately and brain-breakingly worse, for a party. Where are all the ingredients sourced from? What are the most climate-friendly options balanced against price, geography, another important climate consideration, dietary requirement/preference etc.

@JustinMac84 @Sheril Sure, it would be very hard to pick the optimal foods, but you could use a heuristic like "no animal products", or "no animal products or chocolate or coffee", and get almost all the way there, and maybe then it actually doesn't matter if we pick the verymost optimal foods that are left, because there's little to be gained by fine-tuning it more.

@emma_cogdev @Sheril No coffee? 😱 I didn't know coffee was bad. 💔

@JustinMac84 @emma_cogdev @Sheril It's fine – it's high up on the list because the impact per kg is high, but you don't consume very many kg of coffee per day. (I'm assuming this is kg of beans.)

I mean, nearly everything we consume has some kind of impact, of course, but I doubt drinking a cup of coffee has more impact than a dinner of prawns (the next lower item on the list).

I think one take-home point of this post is things like this: I would have assumed that buying beans and then brewing coffee myself was wildly less harmful than buying bottles of brewed coffee, just because of the transportation cost of the water in the coffee bottles. But maybe that assumption isn't quite right.