Overall impact of the 40 most produced foods on the environment: Difference between revisions

Getting to know the actual impact of food on the environment is a tricky business. Indeed, depending on the source<ref>Depending on the various ties that the researchers or institute funding their research may have with the industry.</ref>, the farming system at play in the research<ref>The research may, more than often, exclusively focus on the american farming industry and its leaders, not taking into account small scale, alternative farming, or legislation at play in Europe or other parts of the world.</ref> or the parameters investigated in the study, the overall results may vary tremendously. Furthermore, the “impact on the environment” is more than often restricted to CO2 emissions. Water scarcity, the degradation of the soils<ref>Food production creates ~32% of global terrestrial acidification and ~78% of eutrophication.</ref> or the destruction of ecosystems<ref>e.g deforestation, destruction of “submarine forests” such as coral reefs and algae, annihilation of insect and animal species</ref> are to be considered also in relation  to the CO2 emissions, as well as the impact of the food chain (farm, packaging, transport, retail) on the overall environmental print of the production of food stuffs. All of these elements do, indeed, contribute to the health of the planet and one cannot be favored in relation to another (a low level of CO2 in the atmosphere would be of little help if the majority of our soils would be too acidic to be used for cultivation).     

Researching the matter may be a tremendous, easily biased and forever evoluting task, the spreadsheet below is thus here published to allow us, as consumers and climate conscious citizens, to take a first step towards the understanding of the complex “environmental impacts” of food. This step may therefore allow us to realize that there is no systematic relationship between land use, CO2 emission, soil depletion or water use. For instance, the document challenges popular believes that “dairy is better for the planet than meat” or ”sea food has less impact than meat”. The numbers confirming that dairy production would produce more than 2x CO2, and contribute 4x more to the eutrophisation of the soil than pig meat as well as that crustaceans would produce nearly 3x more C02 and contribute 2x more to the eutrophisation of the waters.  

We will here be able to compare the overall CO2 emissions, the land use, the acidification<ref name=acid />, the eutrophisation<ref name=eutro /> as well as the water scarcity impacted by the 40 most produced foods in the world. These numbers, gathered from the largest database to date: 38,700 farms, across 119 countries includes high impact industrials as well as small scale, organic or bio dynamic farms.