Eating your way to lower emissions
Are you a carnivore, pescetarian, flexitarian, vegetarian, vegan, vegansexual... or a "locavore"? That is, someone who chooses to only eat food that's been produced locally.The word was coined two years ago on a website by Jessica Prentice (author of Full Moon Feast: Food and the Hunger for Connection). She and three Californian friends decided to only eat food produced within 100 miles of San Francisco for a whole month – and challenged others to follow suit, which many gladly did – and continue to do so. (Here are some tips on how to be a locavore)Indeed, eating locally produced food has become such a popular phenomenon that "locavore" was voted Word of the Year by the New Oxford American Dictionary. (Some people refer to themselves as "localvores" but they are one and the same thing.)So what exactly is the great appeal of food that was reared or grown nearby? First and foremost, it's less damaging to the environment. The question is, though, how much less? Let's take a look at the figures.Every year humans are responsible for emitting a total of around 30 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. Of that, the average western European is responsible for 12 tonnes each. Food accounts for 2 of the 12 tonnes (more than the same person's emissions from flying, which add up to around 1.6 tonnes!).Although eating locally produced food does reduce food miles (the distance the food has travelled to get to your mouth) and hence CO2 emissions – it's actually the growing and processing of food that is particularly energy expensive (e.g. manufacturing fertilisers and heating greenhouses).So if you really want to do your bit for the environment, then try to stick to locally grown food that's not been processed or packaged either (importing Spanish tomatoes may require less energy than heating a greenhouse in the UK!). And by doing so, you will save around 0.7 tonnes of CO2 from being released into the atmosphere.And to make an even bigger difference to your carbon footprint, go vegan and reduce your carbon footprint by a further tonne of CO2 (the food the animals eat is energy-expensive to grow). But if you love meat and milk too much to give it up, then try to make sure it's organic, as this will reduce your CO2 emissions by a similar amount. Does anyone know if there is a word for someone who only eats organic food – organivore, perhaps?So, if you were vegan (or an organivore) and ate only locally produced, unpackaged, unprocessed food – you would reduce your yearly CO2 emissions from food by 1.7 tonnes, that's a whopping 85% of the carbon food bill. And what would that make you I wonder – a veganlocavore? A saint more like.I'm a vegetarian (thinking about turning locavore – so I might be a vegilocavore soon), and my boyfriend is a carnivore, but only eats animals that have been reared via a high standard of welfare, so perhaps that makes him a welfarivore.What are you, and why?Lucy Middleton, researcher