A new “Food Talk” podcast with Dani Nierenberg (by Food Tank): 302. Chef, author and food activist Alejandra Schrader discusses her new book, The Low-Carbon Cookbook.
The book provides information on the complex relationship between food and the climate crisis, providing readers with an action plan and recipes to develop a diet that reduces their carbon footprint and their food print. As a founding member of Chef’s Manifesto, Schrader values the crucial role of chefs in helping transform the food system.
To learn more about the The Low-Carbon Cookbook & Action Plan. Reduce Food Waste and Combat Climate Change With 140 Sustainable Plant-Based Recipes (2021), go to:
A new study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition estimates “the potential impact of a single dietary substitution on the carbon and water footprints of self-selected diets in the United States.”1 The authors found that the “highest impact item in Americans’ diet is beef and around 20 percent of survey respondents ate at least one serving of it in a day.” If Americans “collectively swapped one serving of beef — for example, choosing ground turkey instead of ground beef — their diets’ greenhouse gas emissions fell by an average of 48 percent and water-use impact declined by 30 percent.”2
“The study also examined how the change would affect the overall environmental impact of all food consumption in the U.S. in a day — including if 80 percent of diets did not change at all. If only the 20 percent of Americans who ate beef in a day switched to something else for one meal, that would reduce the overall carbon footprint of all U.S. diets by 9.6 percent and reduce water-use impacts by 5.9 percent.”2
To get you started in the kitchen, here is a recipe from Eating Well that uses ground turkey:
Rose D, Willits-Smith AM, Heller MC. Single-item substitutions can substantially reduce the carbon and water scarcity footprints of US diets. Am J Clin Nutr. 2022 Jan 13:nqab338. doi: 10.1093/ajcn/nqab338.
New research published in Nature Food investigates how the global food system would change if 54 high-income nations were to shift to a more plant-based diet (EAT-Lancet planetary health diet):
“A dietary shift from animal-based foods to plant-based foods in high-income nations could reduce greenhouse gas emissions from direct agricultural production and increase carbon sequestration if resulting spared land was restored to its antecedent natural vegetation. We estimate this double effect by simulating the adoption of the EAT–Lancet planetary health diet by 54 high-income nations representing 68% of global gross domestic product and 17% of population. Our results show that such dietary change could reduce annual agricultural production emissions of high-income nations’ diets by 61% while sequestering as much as 98.3 (55.6–143.7) GtCO2 equivalent, equal to approximately 14 years of current global agricultural emissions until natural vegetation matures.”
Sun, Z., Scherer, L., Tukker, A. et al. Dietary change in high-income nations alone can lead to substantial double climate dividend. Nat Food 3,29–37 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-021-00431-5
“Farmers received more than $143.5 billion in federal crop insurance payments from drought and excess moisture, exacerbated by the climate crisis, according to [Environmental Working Group] EWG’s new crop insurance database.”
“The top 10 counties with the largest drought indemnities were in Texas, which has gotten hotter and drier (Table 2).”
New research published in the journal PLoS ONE “models how growing conditions for three popular foods – coffee, cashews, and avocados – will change in the next 30 years…”
See the below National Geographic article for more details about the new study.
An upcoming discussion about the book Our Changing Menu: Climate Change and the Foods We Love and Need (Cornell University Press, 2021) on February 7th at 8 PM ET hosted by the NOAA Planet Stewards book club. See below URL for more information about the book. https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/planet-stewards/upcoming.html
Sustainable RDN 