An international team of scientists assessed the environmental impact of more than 57,000 food items you typically find when you wander the rows of your local grocery store and found that beef and lamb cause the most environmental damage.
According to the researchers’ assessment, beef and lamb are the most damaging to the environment, with the impact far exceeding that of other proteins such as chicken, fish, seafood and nuts, also at the higher end of the environmental impact scale.
At the same time, processed beverages such as carbonated drinks and energy drinks were ranked as the lowest impact among the evaluated foods, sharing space with plant-based foods such as rice and tortillas.
While many studies have been conducted on the environmental impact of food products such as fruits, wheat, and beef, most food products contain many different ingredients, each of which has traveled its own path to become part of the product.
This life cycle data informing the overall environmental impact of the production, harvesting, transportation and processing of said ingredients is largely invisible to the consumer, as are the proportions of the ingredients. This information gap exists because the exact quantity of each ingredient and their supply chain in each food product is often considered a trade secret.
To overcome these limitations, the researchers, led by lead author Michael Clarke of Oxford University, used prior knowledge from ingredient lists to infer the composition of each ingredient. They then combined this information with environmental databases to estimate the impact across four indicators: greenhouse gas emissions, land use, water scarcity, and eutrophication potential (the amount of excess nutrients by production that can pollute the environment and waterways). The scientists applied their approach to 57,000 foods sold in Tesco supermarkets, a large grocery chain in the United Kingdom and Ireland.
While people around the world don’t have exactly the same taste preferences, we tend to have similar tastes, which leads to more or less the same foods in our stores. These tastes tend to gravitate towards foods that are high in sugar. This is a commodity that is both cheap and produced in large quantities.
Plant foods with less processing occupy the healthier end of the scale for both humans and the environment, while highly processed grains and dairy products are conversely more polluting.
