Food

Reduce Your Carbon Emissions With Better Food Choices

The food that we eat might seem a strange place to look to help stop global warming but growing crops and rearing animals for food causes about the same amount of GHG emissions as the transport sector. That comes as quite a shock to most people. Obviously ‘a man’s gotta eat’ so to eliminate carbon emissions completely from this sector may be impossible. It is possible to make enormous in-roads to them, though.

In the UK, we through away 100kg of food per person, per year. That is about 20 full shopping bags of food per person, per year. Not all of it gets thrown away by households: in fact the biggest chuck is from supermarkets rejecting ‘non-conforming’ deliveries, supermarkets throwing away fresh produce that has reached its ‘display until’ date and the catering trade over catering for customers. Eliminate this waste and eliminate a fifth of the emissions associated with food.

Second place for emission reduction is to reduce the amount we eat.  Government statistics estimate that, by 2025, 41% of people in the UK will be obese and by 2050 it will be more than half. At present there are just over 1 million ‘morbidly obese’ people in England alone and an estimated 1 billion overweight people in the world. As well as the GHG emissions caused by over production of food, obese people have poorer levels of health and the cost of treat them for illnesses like diabetes is going to become a major headache in the future.

The good news is that one of the fastest ways to lose weight also has the biggest impact on GHG emission: go vegan. The world could feed three times as many people as is does now with the same energy input if everyone adopted a vegan diet.