How much does eating locally-produced food help the climate problem? What are the other potential environmental and social benefits of eating locally-grown/produced food? Do you have a food garden in your school or at home? If not, do you want one?
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Beef emissions and alternative options
“Meat and dairy specifically accounts for around 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions”, according to interactive.carbonbrief.org. When people hear these numbers, they often think about the factory farms producing meat and assume that they can reduce these numbers by eating locally. Unfortunately, while some local foods produce fewer greenhouse gases than food shipped from around the world, the emissions of the transportation of meat are considerably lower than the rest of the emissions, so not much of a difference is made. For example, the transportation emissions of a beef herd are 0.30kg whereas all other emissions of a beef herd combine to 59.30kg. Even if we could reduce the emissions of transportation, it wouldn’t make much of a difference. However, that may not be as simple as we think. In the article, Willet says, “ ‘Train transportation is really very efficient and shipping is also relatively efficient. And probably more efficient than some small local farmer in western Massachusetts driving three hours with a pick-up truck.’ ” While, as a consumer, it can often seem like eating local is always better, it’s important to do the research to make sure that’s actually the case. Commonly accepted ideas like thinking that eating local is always better can be hard to overcome. As we learn more about the carbon footprint meat has, we can begin to look into alternatives to our diet. For people who still want the taste of meat, relatively new brands such as impossible burger and beyond burger have come out with realistic plant based meat. Those meat alternatives have a much smaller carbon footprint than beef. As we can see in the graph below, Beef has much higher carbon emissions than the emissions of plant based alternatives. The carbon footprint of Beef is 70.50kg whereas the footprint of both the beyond burger and the impossible burger are only 3.50kg. While it can be difficult to change up our diet or the way we source our foods, even changing it slightly can make a huge difference on the greenhouse gas emissions in the world we live in.
