Where could I find a ranking of foods by their carbon footprint?

March 10, 2009 5:28 PM

Where could I find a ranking of foods by their carbon footprint?

I remember hearing that cheese, fish, and tomatoes, even have a higher carbon footprint than chicken.

Does anyone know where I could get an extensive and reliable list of foods by carbon footprint?

posted by GIMG to food & drink (9 comments total)

Extensive and reliable? Who knows…but I found my way to search terms such as "food footprint" Check the FAO, Science News and the Food Footprint Carbon Calculator.

I'd keep looking deeper into this for you but was cutting and hauling biomass most of the day and need sleep.
posted by Dick Paris at 7:26 PM on March 10, 2009

This is tricky, because you have to figure in transportation costs, etc.
Are you talking tomatoes from Mexico and snow peas from China, or from a farmer or greenhouse in your area?
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 8:38 PM on March 10, 2009

With the amount of variance possible within a food, there is no way to have a definitive, reliable ranking among foods. Organically grown X that did not travel far to get to you has a far smaller footprint than does X (or maybe even Y) that is produced using petroleum-derived pesticides, herbicides, fertilizer, and that is trucked (or flown) to you from God-knows-where.

Conventional North American production: Cheese is made from milk from cows that are raised indoors and fed industrially-produced grain such as corn; the corn is made with plenty of petroleum inputs and using heavy machinery, and very likely trucked a fair distance. Fish could be wild-caught in North America, then shipped to China for processing, then shipped back; or it could be farmed with plenty of petroleum inputs. Tomatoes are hothouse-grown with petroleum inputs in, say, Mexico, then trucked. Chickens are raised in battery cages, on less grain per unit of meat produced than are cows. All of this has to get to and from food processors and distributors as well. And then there's also the less obvious footprint of antibiotic/fertilizer/herbicide runoff, of industrial fish farming contaminating and bringing down wild populations, of declining bee populations, etc.

It should be clear that much depends on exactly how the particular food is produced, and where.
posted by parudox at 9:29 PM on March 10, 2009

Following on parudox, it has always struck me that it is even more complicated than this. You have presumably seen arguments that ordering from a large online retailer has a smaller footprint than driving to the mall to buy something, even though the former's wares need to be shipped around the country. But presumably part of this calculus has to be whether or not the UPS truck would have been on your block anyway, or whether you live twenty kilometers into the wilderness, and that is rarely mentioned in analyses I've read. So it has crossed my mind whether buying organic crops at a farmer's market may actually result in a larger footprint than buying at a large grocery store. I mean, if the farmer brought only 50 kilos of food to the market and had to drive down the mountain to bring it....

I don't have any answers, and I've wondered about this myself, but my intuition is that this question would stubbornly resist any sort of general algorithm.
posted by quarantine at 9:40 PM on March 10, 2009

Seasonality is a big issue too. There is no simple answer to this question.
posted by tiburon at 6:19 AM on March 11, 2009

This article mentions values for a few few foods. The caveats about location, transportation distance and seasons apply.

Generally, you can argue that meat from warm-blooded animals is more carbon intensive than other sources (fish or vegetables), as warm-blooded animals need to preserve their body temperature all of their lives and also increase their body mass.
posted by a womble is an active kind of sloth at 6:29 AM on March 11, 2009

I imagine an accurate representation of each food would be EXTRAORDINARILY complex to calculate. That would include season, location, brand, etc. etc.

Would could useful is a thumbnail sketch guide. So in general:

Beef > Shrimp > Cheese > Salmon > Pork > Wine > Chicken > Milk > Carrots

Yet a bit more detailed (obviously). Not completely accurate for all times, varieties, etc., but definitely a useful guide for general carbon footprint guesswork. It would be like the food pyramid in terms of serving as a food heuristic (as opposed to a measure).
posted by GIMG at 8:41 AM on March 11, 2009

Here's a link to a scholarly paper than gives a general guide:

Red meat > dairy products > chicken/fish/eggs > fruit/vegetable > cereals/carbs > oils/sweets/condiments > other misc. > restaurants > beverages.

The corresponding author might be able to give more granular info if you write to him.
posted by acridrabbit at 11:42 AM on March 11, 2009

this isn't really what you asked for, but you might find this water usage guide interesting nonetheless:
posted by wennj at 9:59 AM on March 27, 2009