What we eat has a huge impact not only on our health but also on the health of the planet. That’s a well-known fact. But despite mountains of research showing us which foods we should and shouldn’t eat, many of us find it hard to take the right action. Sophie Atwood’s work takes a different approach: rather than presenting the bare facts about diet and its impact on climate change, she uses behavioral science to convince people to choose environmentally friendly options. In May, she and her colleagues at the World Resources Institute, a global sustainability think tank, Key Reports How the food industry can move people towards more sustainable foods. The aim is not to intimidate consumers, but to make plant-based options more attractive and reduce the desire to choose meat.
Graham Lawton: How much of a problem are unsustainable diets for the climate?
Sophie Atwood: It’s a huge problem. The biggest driver of diet-related climate change is the types of food people eat. A lot of people think it’s things like food miles and pesticides. It’s not. It’s beef. There are a few reasons for that, but the main one is that cows are often fed soy, which usually comes from deforested areas, so that requires cutting down rainforest. And It takes about 20 kilograms of soybeans to produce 1 kilogram of beef. Not only is this a highly inefficient way to produce calories, but the cows themselves also emit large amounts of methane from digestive tract fermentation and nitrogen from manure – greenhouse gases throughout the entire production chain.
We can’t continue eating the same way we used to…
Source: www.newscientist.com
