Food and agriculture have a significant impact on our planet, particularly in terms of carbon emissions, water withdrawals, and land use.
all the water use in poore-nemecek 2018 (the source for this chart) is dubious. they treat each end product as though all the inputs were made only for that end product AND as though the inputs wouldnt have been produced (and wasted) anyway as the result of some other process. it has no contextualization of the broader systems of production.
Also like… Cheese is where you take all the valuable stuff out of milk and through away the water that constitutes most of it’s mass. Of course it’s a poor water to weight ratio because most of the weight of milk is water. But in terms of water usage to available dietary nutrition I can’t see it being very different to milk.
It makes the exception for land use change for chocolate, but isn’t almost all agricultural land a land use change which contributes? Most soybean and other crops aren’t as effective at sequestering carbon as the natural grasslands they took over. Orchards and other crops also took over forests and turned them into pastures and fields.
It’s informative, but 1kg of beef and 1kg of coffee beans is not a meaningful comparison :D
The absence of palm oil–or any cooking oil–is pretty dubious.
While it’s not perfect I think emissions per calorie is a better measurement than emissions per kg (even more importantly for making comparisons of water usage.)
