You may already know how food manufacture contributes to global warming—it’s had its fair share of coverage lately, though the actual numbers have varied. In 2007, climate change experts pegged agriculture as producing 10 to 12 percent of global emissions. A Greenpeace study bumps this number up to 17 to 32 percent when you factor in land-use changes such as deforestation and overgrazing.
But a four-year UK study recently released by the Food Climate Research Network is likely to be the most comprehensive research so far. Pegging 19 percent of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions as food-related—with meat and dairy contributing half of those—the report serves up more than the usual recommendations to shop locally and walk to the store.
Among the options? Eliminating “unnecessary” foods with little nutritional value like alcohol, which it says contributes 1.5 percent of emissions from food, and chocolate. According to Cadbury, notes the report, the milk in a chocolate bar is the source of 60 percent of the bar’s greenhouse gas emissions (no word on whether dark chocolate-lovers are more eco-friendly).
Other personal change recommendations include: using microwaves more often, covering cooking pots for efficiency, shopping on the Internet, and accepting “different notions of quality”—presumably eating bruised peaches.
The UK report also states that by 2050 we’ll all need to eat similar to developing countries today: A four-ounce portion (or two sausages) of meat every other day, four cups of milk per week, max, and no cheese. (Currently, the average Brit consumes more than three times that, or the equivalent of two chicken breasts, four ham sandwiches, six sausages, eight pieces of bacon, three hamburgers, 12.5 cups of milk, and three and a half ounces of cheese each week.)
But what do the meat and dairy associations have to say about this? Not surprisingly, the National Farmers’ Union in England calls the proposals “simplistic”. Chocolate lovers have yet to weigh in.
—Brittney Andres
