In the growing confusopoly over the beneifts of freighting versus local, scientists at the University of Cardiff believe that they have developed a way of minimising the information costs of adhering to eco-friendly food consumption.
After the Atkins Diet, the Hollywoood diet, the banana diet, and the peanut butter diet, comes the ‘eco-diet’. Designed not so much to conserve wastelines as coastlines, the eco-diet, according to its authors, considers all environmental hazards, from seed to fork, and scores produce as acceptable if it minimises overall environmental damage.
“I'm a bit worried about the food miles [debate] because it is educating the consumer in the wrong way. It is such an insignificant point," said project instigator Ruth Fairchild at the University of Wales Institute in Cardiff. "Those [foods] could have been produced using pesticides that have travelled all the way around the world. If you just take food miles, it is the tiny bit on the end."
A better system, she argues, would be one that considers all environmental impacts from farm to dinner plate. One option is ecological footprint analysis, which takes into account the amount of land needed to provide the resources to produce food, both directly on the farm and indirectly from the energy that goes into growing, harvesting, processing, packaging and transporting it. A food's impact is measured in ‘global hectares’, the notional land area needed to produce it. But she thinks that consumers are not yet ready for ecological footprint labelling and the science behind it is not yet watertight.
To help confused consumers, Fairchild and colleague Andrea Collins at Cardiff University have used the ecological footprint concept to develop a set of eco-diets designed to minimise the impact of food consumption on the planet.
The diets are based on an analysis of the ecological footprint associated with the food consumed by the average Cardiff resident in a week. The three diets are progressively more austere in their ecological footprint, with the most strict allowing only foods with a footprint of less than 0.002 global hectares per kilogramme. This meant replacing around one in six food items with less eco-profligate fare which had a similar nutritional makeup. This diet has a 40 percent lower ecological footprint than the typical Cardiff diet.
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