Foods to Eat to Cut Emissions: Chicken, Honey, Whole Wheat
We have been told that agricultural accounts for 51% of emissions and that eating meat is the single worst thing you can do to the environment (provoking 60 comments on both sides in a recent post). And we also know that sometimes flying food half way around the world is a bad idea, and sometimes it's better than growing it out off season in greenhouses. But what should we be eating?
Benno Hansen explains the familiar foods vices in a comprehensive blog post based on a peer reviewed journal article. It explains that we should avoid steak and cod, and not eat proteins like cheese and eggs in excess, as we do currently. And if we want to replace these food with foods that are better for the environment, for the meat eaters, the evidence points favorably to chicken.
For the meat eaters, chicken is six times less polluting to produce per kilo than steak. Small scale chicken production can help keep pests down, with chickens also able to recycle food waste, and live most anywhere in the world. In place of cod, herring is suggested. It is forty times less polluting that chicken, whilst in terms of protein efficiency domestically produced wheat scores even higher.
The others winners are fresh carrots, potatoes and honey, all causing very little greenhouse-house gas emissions. Also apples, even when they are shipped in by boat. So best avoid the lasagne, and choose whole wheat or potato based dishes as much as possible.
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