So you’ve changed your light bulbs, switched to wind power, and maybe even bought an electric car. What else can you do to help the planet?
How about dinner?
Fossil fuels get all the attention when it comes to climate warming, so it’s easy to forget the impact of our food. It’s not bite-sized: a 2017 University of Waterloo study found that the typical omnivorous Canadian diet adds some 2,282 kilograms of greenhouse gases to the air a year – roughly the same that you’d cause on a round-trip drive from St. Albert to Fredericton, N.B.
Greening your diet is just about the easiest, cheapest way to help the planet around, and it’ll help your body and wallet, too. No eco-friendly diet is complete without two main ingredients: less meat and less waste.
A meaty issue
Meat, particularly beef, is a gigantic slice of your dinner’s carbon pie. That U of Waterloo study found 48 per cent of the carbon emissions from a typical omnivore’s diet came from beef, compared to just 7.5 per cent for vegetables and 1.6 per cent for chicken.
Beef’s big footprint comes down to biology and geography, explains Tim Searchinger, a research scholar at Princeton University who studies the environmental impacts of food for the UN-affiliated World Resources Institute.
“Ruminants (cows, sheep and goats) are all about turning grass into food,” he said, and they do so through enteric fermentation, which produces plenty of the potent greenhouse gas methane. They also reproduce slowly – you get one calf per cow per year, compared to six piglets per pig. If you eat lots of cows, as we do, you need lots of land to raise and feed them.
“And land has a real cost to it,” Searchinger said.
While many cows are raised on native grasslands, virtually all that grassland is already in use, he explained – some 40 per cent of the land used to raise ruminants today was once carbon-storing forest. Demand for ruminant meat is set to surge 88 per cent by 2050, and we’ll have to clear a heck of a lot more forest to make that extra beef.
Searchinger and his team found that every million calories of beef consumed produces some 227 tons of greenhouse gas emissions – about 12 times what the equivalent amount of chicken would cause, and 33 times what you’d get from pulses.
Searchinger found that agricultural emissions must fall by 11 gigatonnes by 2050 for the world to have any real chance of staying below 2 C of warming. Even if you assume huge improvements in on-farm efficiency and reforestation, it’s impossible to meet that emissions target unless we all eat less meat, particularly ruminant meat.
“It’s not an issue of whether (or not) the world eats no beef,” he emphasized.
“The issue is how much beef.”
Searchinger found that the world could cover half of the needed cuts to agricultural emissions if everyone ate about 30 per cent less ruminant meat by 2050, which in North America is mostly beef. That works out to a 40 per cent reduction for North Americans, which would still allow us to eat 1.5 burgers’ worth of beef a week and see global ruminant meat consumption rise 30 per cent.
Ideally, you’d replace that meat with plant-based proteins such as beans and lentils, but you’ll still make a big difference if you exchange beef with chicken or eggs, Searchinger said. If you do switch to plant-based proteins, you’ll save money – a pound of beans costs a lot less than a pound of steak.
You’ll also improve your health. Health Canada’s Food Guide recommends eating plant-based proteins more often and eating fruits and vegetables regularly. Doing so will get you more fibre and less saturated fat, which evidence shows reduces your risk of heart disease and colorectal cancer.
You’re aiming for a part-time vegetarian or “flexitarian” diet, which is one that’s mostly plant-based but includes meat and dairy. The EAT-Lancet Commission found that such a diet adopted worldwide would prevent about 11 million deaths a year and fight climate change.
Edmonton nutritionist Maureen Elhatton said she went flexitarian because of her vegetarian daughter. Start by going meat-free one day a week, she suggests. A family of four going meat-and-cheese-free one day a week is the emissions-reductions equivalent of not driving a car for five weeks, analyst Kari Hamerschlag found.
“Beans, peas and lentils are a really good source of protein,” Elhatton said, and can be substitutes for meat in many recipes – try chickpea chilli, or any of the dishes from the Alberta Pulse Growers website. Ask your friends for recipes and keep experimenting until you find one you like.
You don’t need as much meat on your plate if you prepare your vegetables right, said chef Blair Lebsack of Edmonton’s RGE RD (Range Road) restaurant.
“People have to start treating vegetables more like a meat if they really like that meat flavour,” he said. Cut and grill that cauliflower to give it a tasty char, roast those roots in fire, and sear and butter those oyster mushrooms so they taste like steak.
Peas and lentils hold flavour extremely well and can make great patties, risottos and soups, Lebsack said. Mushrooms are very meaty, and ground seaweed can add umami and that protein taste to any dish. Add nuts and cheese to spaghetti squash and you have a complete meal – you can add a sprinkle of cured meat for flavour.
“You’re getting 95 per cent vegetables, and it’s super flavourful.”
Waste not
Once you’ve put more vegetables and less meat on your plate, it’s time to make sure your food doesn’t go to waste.
The group Second Harvest reported last January that Canadians needlessly waste some 11.2 million tonnes of food a year, adding 22.2 million tonnes of greenhouse gases to the air and squandering 1.4 billion tonnes of water in the process, in addition to wasted labour, chemical and soil resources. Avoidable food waste costs us $49.5 billion a year – equivalent to half our national grocery bill or $1,766 per household. Some 21 per cent of this waste happens in our homes.
There are many reasons for this waste, said Lebsack and Elhatton. A lot of us chuck perfectly good food just because it’s near its “best before” date, for example (those dates indicate quality, not safety); buy huge volumes of food, only for it to go bad before we can eat it all; or forget fruits and vegetables at the back of the fridge.
“Before you know it, you’ve got wrinkled apples and wrinkled oranges and you’re saying, ‘What a waste of money!’” Elhatton said.
Waste reduction saves money and prevents pollution. A 25 per cent cut in food waste would account for about 15 per cent of the emissions reductions that need to happen in agriculture for us to meet the 2 C target, Searchinger found.
You can avoid waste by buying just what you need and shopping more often, Elhatton and Lebsack said. Those dozen Costco muffins might be cheap, but can you really eat them all before they go stale?
You can prevent forgotten fruit by keeping a fruit basket on your table, Elhatton said. It brightens up the room and helps you make healthier choices when you’re searching for a snack.
Elhatton suggests having a designated spot in your fridge for leftovers so you don’t forget them, and to up-cycle them for variety. Spaghetti sauce can become pizza with a bit of dough and cheese, while that chickpea chilli also works in tacos.
Don’t chuck those peels and bones in the trash, either. Lebsack said his crew tosses all their scrap guts, bones and vegetables into the stockpot each day to make broth. You also get more fibre out of your apples and carrots if you wash them instead of peeling them, Elhatton said. If you do have food waste, put it in your green composting cart so it doesn’t turn to methane in the landfill.
There are other ways to green your diet – eating locally grown food, for example – but none match the benefits of eating less meat and making less waste. Those steps will give you a richer, healthier life, and help reduce climate change, deforestation, soil degradation, and water use and pollution.
Changing your diet can be tough for picky eaters, but it’s one of the cheapest, easiest ways to improve the health of your planet and yourself. And who knows? You might like how it tastes.
