August 12th, 2009 · No Comments

By Melissa Segrest
Green Right Now

Shall we have an omelet with vegetables and cheese for breakfast?

Let’s order a Caesar salad for lunch, with some chicken noodle soup.

And dinner – Who’s up for meatloaf, with macaroni and cheese on the side and some chocolate chip cookies to top it off?

Oh, while you’re at it, stop for a second and ask yourself: What impact does this food have on the environment?

Here’s some food for thought: An entertaining interactive tool lets you add up your “carbon points” and see just how badly those three cups of coffee are hurting the world.

The Sierra Club’s Green Home site has a lineup of virtual meals and menu items that you can drag and drop into a frying pan to calculate your “CO2e points.”

CO2e represents the carbon dioxide equivalent emissions of greenhouse gases (which can include methane). The researchers who helped develop the tool established that eating 4,500 “carbon points” a day is a pretty high count. If you eat that much or more, “it equals emissions of about three tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) every year – the equivalent of taking three round-trip, three-hour flights,” the site says. Each point is 1 gram of CO2e.

The world’s food system, they say, is responsible for one-third of all the world’s greenhouse gas emissions – and eating in the U.S. contributes 5 percent of the globe’s greenhouse gases.

We took the frying pan for a whirl:

Under the “Menu items” tab we chose from an array of food options for our three meals: granola with yogurt and a banana for breakfast, Chinese chicken salad and lentil soup for lunch, and for dinner, several portions of tuna, shrimp and salmon sushi. Oh, and some sugar cookies. We can’t forget our daily dose of coffee, soda and wine, as well.

The grand total: 3,654 points. Not too bad.

Under the “Sample Meals” tab, we were presented with a selection of options that might be selected at a restaurant. For breakfast, simple cereal with a banana; for lunch, a roast beef sandwich and chips; for dinner – we couldn’t resist – an Indian feast!

Gulp. Even without the coffee, soda and wine our score was off the charts with a whopping 9.432 points. How grossly un-green.

The calculator was created with the help of Bon Appétit Management Company, which provides cafes and catering services to companies, colleges and other venues. Their emphasis is on fresh food and cooking from scratch with sustainable ingredients. Also, they cite research from more than 40 peer-reviewed research papers compiled by two science teams.

The carbon calculator isn’t perfect — it doesn’t have all possible ingredients and combinations that you encounter in a normal day. But based on your preferences, you can get a pretty good idea of where you stand.

There is also a helpful Q&A section (click on the “What do these points mean?” line under the little carbon thermometer). Among their bits of wisdom:

Don’t try to eliminate every carbon point from your total – aim for knocking off 25 percent of the points from your daily diet.

You bought it, you eat it – throwing out food eats up a lot of energy, and in a landfill it creates more methane gas released into the atmosphere.

Buy seasonal and regional – That’s obvious. But did you know that tomatoes or lettuce grown in hothouses can create more emissions than those grown in the ground that are farther away and trucked in? Or that canned tomatoes processed in season are more climate-friendly than greenhouse-grown ones? And a true offender? Tropical fruit flown from far, far away.

Cut down the beef and cheese – You don’t have to become a vegan, but the calculator says that “Livestock production causes 18 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases . . . Consider reducing portion sizes of meat and cheese” and eat them less often.

Don’t eat fish that’s flown – “fresh” seafood flown great distances is substantially worse, environmentally, than that which is “processed and frozen at sea.” And, they say, it’s probably not going to taste as good as the latter.

Forget processed food – Junk food, packaged snacks and cereal bars are energy gluttons.

Is organic food better? – Not necessarily, they say, because what you eat and how much you waste is more important in terms of your carbon footprint.

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media