Food is Vital in the Fight to Reduce GHGs

This is a historic week in the fight to reduce green-house-gases with President Obama's decision to significantly raise vehicle fuel efficiency standards. While I applaud this move and everything else the new administration is doing in this area, it will not be enough.

The President can only operate on the supply side of the economy. Government can effectively set a price on carbon and consumers will have to pay a higher price for products that emit too much. It's not that I believe this won't work; it's just that these types of market forces take time – time we don't have and can't afford to waste.

We need to open a second front in the war. We need to fight on the demand side as well – we need to engage consumers actively in the fight. Consumers have been sitting on the sidelines. Hundreds of millions of us in the U.S. and billions across the world. This is a waste and a huge mistake.

What if every time a consumer bought something, not only did they ask what it costs, but also, what impact the product has on the planet? As it turns out, food shopping and consumption is the perfect place to start for three reasons:

• Important. Food is a big deal all by itself. Based on pioneering work by Chris Weber and Scott Matthews at Carnegie Mellon University¹, food growing, processing, packaging, distribution and retail accounts for 12% of total U.S. GHG emissions.


• Broad. How we consume food, to a large extent, is a lifestyle choice. And how we consume food accounts for another 3.3% of total emissions². This includes trips to the grocery store (in a big vehicle that may have been chosen because it is easy to load and unload), cooking, cleanup, waste and recycling.


• Frequent. People buy groceries frequently. According to ACNeilsen's tracking survey, the average American family shopped for groceries 1.3 times per week in 2004. At least once each week, every household in this country is considering food choices. They are looking for new things and comparing ingredients and prices. They are in effect learning something new about food every week. What if GHG emissions were something they were learning about and considering every week?
  

This is the vital role food can play: Make a big dent in emissions … learn something about how our lifestyle emits GHGs … make an adjustment … repeat (again next week). And pretty soon, GHGs will be top-of-mind. GHGs will be a regular part of our decision making process for everything we consume.

Sources:
(1) Chris Weber and Scott Matthews: "Food-Miles and the relative Climate Impacts of Food Choices in the United States", April 2008 (unfortunately there is no free source for this important study). This research may still underestimate emissions from land use changes and emissions from imported food.
(2) Tara Garnett: "Cooking up a storm" Food Climate Research Network, The Center for Environmental Strategy, University of Surrey – Sept 2008. This study also shows that the overall food footprint (including the supply chain and consumer end-use) account for 19% of total U.K. emissions. It is likely that one of the reasons that the U.K. food footprint is proportionately larger than in the U.S. is because the U.K. imports significantly more of its food and transportation is much larger in the U.S.