By: Daria Mahgoub

By Budda ©- Free under RF-LL terms from www.dreamstime.com

I’m currently battling withdrawal symptoms from my weekly fix of Reese’s Pieces, but I’m doing it any way. Here’s why.

The food crisis has been directly linked with climate change in more than one manner. Food contributes significant amounts of Carbon dioxide and other Green House Gases to our atmosphere. How? Rearing livestock, planting and harvesting, transport and waste management are some of the main problems. These problems are made worse by the expanding size of the world population, shrinking size of arable agricultural land, clean water shortage and ongoing species diversity loss. To add to this, farming uses valuable finite fossil fuels, while there is an ongoing search for renewable energy sources.

Looking at the entire process Ingerborg Boyen wrote in Another Season’s Promise: “The amount of energy required to produce a calorie of food is constantly increasing. The issue is not just the food required, to do all the mechanical work on the farm: energy is also needed to manufacture fertilizer and chemicals, to transport and to refrigerate food in the final stages of its delivery to the consumer.”

Food is air-freighted or shipped all over the globe in huge amounts. The ease (or so it seems) made it possible to have out of season food all year round in places were demand is present. Rising concerns about fossil fuels reserves and the ever changing, ever rising price of fuel haven’t done much to reduce this aspect; they only increased the price of the goods freighted, and people, it seems, gladly paid up.

This led to the “food miles” discussion, where advocacy focused on eating locally produced food rather than food that traveled hundreds of miles to get to our plates- like my Reese’s Pieces chocolate bar.  This spurred a big argument of shipping versus aviation. In a recent report, the International Maritime Organization claims that the shipping industry produces about 1.2 billion tons of CO₂ annually, while the aviation industry emits in the range of 600-650 million tons annually.

Besides transport, energy intensity and water consumed in production varies for each food item. A 70g tomato requires about 13 liters of water, while 150g of hamburger might need up to 2,400 liters. The energy inputs are much more complicated to calculate than the outputs. Furthermore, it’s a known fact that livestock rearing produces massive amounts of greenhouse gases, some argued that rearing might produce more greenhouse gases than transport.

There is more though, the reared, farmed and transported goods are packaged and processed (chilled or frozen) which adds to their emissions. Arguably (again), these alone may outweigh the food miles of the items.

To conclude, we’ll need to work on our food consumption habits to reduce our food carbon print significantly. More importantly, we’ll need to make sense of the massive amounts of arguments and information available on eco-friendly food shopping and consumption.

Until there is a global or national system that tags food with its collective footprint, we’ll have to make do with locally grown, organic and seasonal food.

One last thought, if we did have food footprint tags, would you shop accordingly?