Like many people, I shudder with joy over delicious food. Eating, especially with friends and family, is deeply pleasurable to me. And I’ve just discovered a great website about food by Bon Appetit, right here, that lets us count the carbon footprint of our food choices.
I just finished “making” my favorite breakfast a veggie omelet, at the Bon Appetit site, for a carbon (not carbohydrate) cost of 783 points. If I had added cheese, it would have been 1,299 points, so I left the cheese off. To add meat, 220 additional carbon points. Pass!
Why count the carbon emissions it takes to grow our food and get it to our tables? It’s fun. Fun to be a small part of the wide set of solutions to global warming. Since carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming, and one-third of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions are caused by the food system, what we eat makes a big difference. The less carbon, the better. Think of it as being like saturated fat to help you remember.
Here, let’s go shopping for produce for lunch. Raw vegetables that are in season will cost us just 80 carbon points. We can grill them for just 15 additional points. But if they were raised in a hot house, uh oh, 862 carbon points total. (Guess we want to stay away from heating up houses full of vegetables. )
Lentils for our lunch are only 56 carbon points, while prime rib is 4,894 points (all servings are four ounces). Hummus is 188; fried chicken 580. The one that breaks my heart is 1,032 carbon points for a serving of domestic cheese. Cheese tastes so good, and has the happy advantage of not killing the cow. I talked about this last January with a friendly Bon Appetit employee I met at a Focus The Nation reception. She said yes, the biggest surprise to most people is that vegetarians who eat dairy are not necessarily reducing their carbon footprint. This is largely because cows are grain-fed rather than grass-fed, and grain is raised with heavy fossil fuel inputs.
Dessert for our lunch! A serving of fruit that’s in season is 179 carbon points, Bon Appetit advises us. However, we ship in a serving of fruit from the tropics and we more than double the carbon load, up to 475 points. I’m glad I’m never been bananas over pineapples and kiwi.
I want all growers everywhere to make good livings, but maybe more growers and their neighbors need to be locavores, eating what they grow (and expecting us to eat what we grow) rather than shipping it thousands of miles away in a rapidly warming world of finite fossil fuels.
Related Posts:
- Cooking For Climate Change, Part 2
- Cooking For Climate Change, Part 1
- Getting Dirty With Spring Planting
Hi – just found your blog through your comment at Zen Habits. Like what I’ve seen so far. Thanks so much for the intro to Bon Appetit – such a good idea!
My family of four eats very local. All of our meat, vegetables, and everyday fruit comes from Oregon or Washington. We get fish from Alaska and this time of year, I do buy fresh citrus from California, though we do without oranges the rest of the year. (Lemons and limes are hard to let go entirely, but we don’t buy them as much as we used to.) Occasionally (like four times a year), I’m persuaded by one of my littles to buy a few bananas. I bake 90% of our family’s bread, cookies, cakes, etc., and I think that the wheat in the Bob’s Red Mill flour I use is grown in Washington. We’re so blessed in this region to have such abundant food.