Environmentally friendly diets and their efficacy in reducing our carbon footprint.
Veganism and plant-based diets have skyrocketed in the last decade, with a 600% increase in vegans in the US in the last three years. A new study suggests that eating a vegan diet could be the ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your environmental impact on Earth.
Food production is responsible for one-quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. From growing, rearing, farming, processing and transporting food, our food choices can have a huge impact on our carbon footprint.
Food's carbon footprint
Greenhouse gas emissions
Agricultural emissions are projected to increase by 80% by 2050.
If we all went vegan, the world’s food-related emissions would drop 70% by 2050, according to a 2016 report on food and climate in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
When talking about GHGs, a lot of people focus on transportation emissions, when in reality animal agriculture is responsible for more emissions than the transportation sector combined.
Transportation exhaust is responsible for 13% of all emissions
Animal agriculture is responsible for 18% of all emissions
Cows belch 150 billions of methane per day.
Methane is roughly 30x more potent as a heat-trapping gas, meaning over a 20-year period, it traps 84x more heat per mass unit than CO2.
Read about what makes methane so potent here:
Deforestation and Land Use
Less than 30% of the Earth’s surface is land.
43% of this land is dedicated to agriculture
Of this 43%, the land is broken down into land for livestock, feed for livestock and food for human consumption. Worldwide at least 50% of the grain grown is to feed livestock, when this same amount of grain could feed 10 billion people.
Water
In a study looking at the health benefits and the environmental impact of foods, they found that unprocessed red meat had twice the water impact of dairy, nuts, processed red meat and olive oil.
It takes 2,400 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef, which is 20x larger than the water footprint of cereals or starchy roots. To save 2,400 gallons of water, you would have to not shower for 6 months.
Other Statistics from a study investigating the health and environmental impacts of food
relative environmental impact per serving of food produced, where a value of 1 indicates that producing a serving of food has the same environmental impact as producing a serving of vegetables
data are plotted on a rank order axis such that the food group with the lowest mean impact for a given health or environmental indicator (best health) has a value of 1 (innermost circle), and the food group with the highest mean impact for a given indicator has a value of 15 (outermost circle)
the y-axis is plotted on a log scale and is the AREI of producing a serving of each food group across 5 environmental outcomes relative to the impact of producing a serving of vegetables.
Is a vegan diet really effective?
Researchers at the University of Oxford found that cutting meat and dairy products from your diet can reduce an individuals carbon footprint by up to 73%.
The carbon footprint of a vegetarian is around half of a meat lover’s diet.
The carbon footprint of a vegan is around 2.5 times less than a meat lover’s.
On an individual scale, if you personally transition to a vegan diet, here's what you'll be saving:
1,100 gallons of water
45 pounds of grain
30 square feet of forest
10 pounds of CO2
1 animal
… every day.
The other half of the picture
There is no question that we should be eating less intensively farmed, high-carbon emitting grain-fed meat, however vegan diets can also lead to an unsustainable use of resources.
Jumping onto the vegan bandwagon places pressure on industrially grown soya or maize which requires large amounts of acid-neutralising lime, synthetic fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides to grow. These toxic chemicals, including greenhouse gases, are an environmental hazard.
Additionally, many vegan ‘superfoods’ such as avocado or quinoa are imported. Around 1kg of food transported from half way across the world has about the same impact as producing 1kg of local organic meat.
This is called food miles: the number of miles food travels to get to the consumer. More food miles equals more pollution.
Many people argue that instead, we should instead encourage sustainable forms of meat and dairy. Grazing livestock and animals’ dung and urine can restore soils. Soil erosion is one of the greatest catastrophes facing our world today - animal dung feeds earthworms, bacteria and invertebrates that pull the manure down into the Earth, returning nutrients and structure to the soil.
However “sustainable” meat, dairy or eggs is a dubious claim. Read more about it here:
The bottom line
Even with an increase in preference for plant-based diets, UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation claims the amount of meat that Americans and Britons consume per day has risen by 10% since 1970.
Cutting down on flights or cars only reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Whereas being mindful of our food choices proves to be more beneficial for the environment.
“A vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth, not just greenhouse gases, but global acidification, eutrophication, land use and water use.”
Climate change is real. Everything and everyone makes a difference, especially when our planet is in dire need of saving.
Sources
Benefits of veganism
Carbon footprint of food
Efficacy of veganism
Graphs and statistics