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 there's a chart right above that shows the top GHG emissions for each food type, including coffee. Chocolate is num 5, coffee num 6.
It's a little weird cause it's per kg of the food. And people consume many more kgs of beef or dairy than of chocolate and coffee. Most people anyway....
@colo_lee @JustinMac84 @emma_cogdev @Sheril Yeah the graph might be more usable if it was in terms of per serving or something. (Also I'd like to see beans or something on there, as an alternative to meats – but soymilk is looking good so I'll go with that.)
One thing gets through accurately: clearly beef and other animal products, as they're typically farmed, are high-impact foods.
@ech @colo_lee @JustinMac84 @emma_cogdev @Sheril they provide the data. You could make a chart with that added dimension
@ech @JustinMac84 @emma_cogdev @Sheril I think you can come pretty close by using the line for "peas" to stand for beans, pulses, etc.