The author is Adam Vaughan.
Meat has a larger impact on the environment than other products.
E W Brown is related to Alamy.
Don't go to the supermarket with pies and cheese. An analysis of thousands of food and drink products sold in the UK found that they fare worst for nutrition and the environment. The meat and fish shelves should be avoided if you want to curb carbon emissions and water use.
Most studies looking at the environmental footprint of food have focused on the impact of agricultural commodities such as beef or soya, rather than the products that shoppers often buy. Consumer products have usually been the focus of research.
More than 57,000 food and drink products were analysed by Michael Clark and his team at the University of Oxford. The ingredients data was taken from a number of retailers.
Only a tenth of the products had precise figures on how much each ingredient was in them. Clark and his colleagues were able to estimate the rest thanks to the fact that UK regulations require ingredients to be listed in descending order. All the ingredients were linked to a database of environmental impacts.
Meat, fish and cheese products had the highest environmental impact. It was followed by desserts, pastries and pies. The lowest burden was fruit, vegetables, bread and drinks. There was an overlap between low environmental impact and good nutrition for the majority of the time.
Clark concedes that this isn't mind-blowing because we already know what we're talking about. It's not that beef has high impacts, fish has high impacts, and cheese has high impacts. He says that it is the fact that you can get impact estimates for products that people are buying that has a lot of knock-on implications.
A growing body of evidence shows that eco labels can help consumers make better decisions. Retailers have struggled in the past with the size of the challenge. The company stopped trying to add carbon labels to its products because it would take a long time to assess them all.
Clark suggests a way to label at scale. The data could be turned into an app that could be used by shoppers or retailers to reduce their environmental impact. He says that the information is available in a way that makes it easier for people to make decisions.
Different sources of the same ingredients, such as beef produced in the UK or imported, are not accounted for in the new research. According to the UK Climate Change Committee, UK beef emissions are 14 percent lower than the EU average.
Hannah Ritchie at Our World in Data says that the paper provides a lot of value by making the environmental impacts of foods more tangible. Most previous studies focused on the impacts of broad food categories. She thinks the study is a step in the right direction.
The journal is called PNAS and it can be found at 10.1073/pnas.
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