Measuring The Carbon Footprint Of Your Food
By: Garima Anand
Tags: Emissions, Quarantine, Environmental Impact, Foodies, Carbon

People across the world are becoming increasingly concerned about climate change and see it to be a major threat to their country.

Food production is responsible for a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Our diet and food choices have a significant impact on our carbon footprint. So, how does one go about reducing their carbon footprint of food?

Well, you must have heard nutritionists and dieticians recommending to “eat local”. While it makes sense intuitively, it might not be a sound advice to give.

Eating local makes sense if transport of food accounts for most greenhouse gas emissions thereby impacting your carbon footprint. Truth be told, for majority of foods this is not the case.

Greenhouse gas emissions from transportation make up a small amount of emissions from food and what you eat has a more significant impact on your carbon footprint.

Let’s have a look at the original visualization to see if this makes sense.

Looking at data from 38,700 commercially viable farms across 119 countries we understand the contribution of each stage in the supply chain (land use, animal feed, farm, retail, processing transport, packaging) to green house gas emissions by food product type.

What worked for the visualization?

· The stacked bar chart does a good job of showing the contribution of each stage in the supply chain to GHG emissions broken down by food product type.

· The title is clear and simple.

· The supply chain is explained at the top giving more context to the data.

· Annotations across the chart make the process of understanding and analyzing individual items easier.

What didn’t work for the visualization?

· There are too many colors making it difficult to distinguish some segments from each other.

· The annotations combined with the colors make the chart look very busy. This distracts a person from understanding the main message that the chart is trying to communicate.

· Grouping of food products by plant and animal-based origins could have helped to give an added dimension to the story.

· Some interactivity with the chart and powerful tooltips could make the viz more impactful.

My Interpretation:

· I created a horizontal bubble chart to show how various food products contributed to GHG emissions at different levels of the supply chain.

· I focused on the story of beef (beef herd). The viz shows that a kg of beef produced accounts for 60 kg of GHG emissions. Combining farm and land use change, a kg of beef accounts for almost 56kg of GHG emissions. That is, these two stages in the supply chain are responsible for 93% of GHG emissions from beef.[i]

· Transport accounts for only 0.5% of emissions from beef and 3.3% of the carbon footprint overall.

· What is interesting to observe is that plant-based food products have a lower carbon footprint than animal-based food products. The highest contributor of GHG emissions among plant-based food products is coffee (16.5kg of GHG per kg of coffee). That is still 3.6 times less than beef.

· Once food leaves the farm, other stages of the supply chain (retail, packaging, transport and processing) account for only 13% of the carbon footprint. This is demonstrated using a heat map as a highlight table. A heat map is used to show relationship between two factors. A highlight table provides detailed information on heat maps.

So, does ‘eating local’ really matter? How does one really reduce the carbon footprint of their food?

Eating less meat and dairy or switching from ruminant meat to chicken, pork, fish and eggs or other plant-based alternatives will reduce the carbon footprint of your food by nearly 127 times!

· [i] Above ground changes in biomass due to deforestation and below ground changes in soil are responsible for land use change. Farm stage emissions include processes such as application of fertilizers (organic and synthetic) and the production of methane in the stomach of cattle.

Click here to understand the carbon footrpint of your food.