Rethinking Your Plate
What’s on your grocery list this week? Whether you’re picking out apples or salmon, every choice impacts the planet. It can feel overwhelming, even impossible, to make sustainable choices through a deluge of scattered information. Researchers at NCEAS have created the first-ever comprehensive ranking of foods from a sustainability perspective, helping consumers and policymakers make decisions with confidence.
Previous work in this field focused on certain foods and one environmental pressure, like beef and greenhouse gas emissions. NCEAS research put everything on the same table, from seafood to crops and livestock, and then compared environmental consequences across habitat disturbance, climate emissions, water use, and nutrient pollution. The result is a clear map of how these foods relate to each other, and there are some surprises.
Most notably, all seafood — both wild and farmed — has a lower environmental impact than livestock. Wild-caught marine fisheries, in particular, require no essentially no freshwater or fertilizers, eliminating two major environmental pressures. Shellfish like clams and mussels rank especially high in sustainability. However, not all seafood is equal: bottom-trawl fishing, which disturbs the seafloor and releases stored carbon, makes wild-caught cod less eco-friendly than chicken.
“The narrative of “aquaculture bad, wild good” is now challenged by quantitative data. This has influenced both public discourse and sustainability policy. Environmental non-profits that previously discouraged aquaculture are now seeing it in a new light. I have seen that shift in just a decade of doing this work, which is pretty extraordinary,” said Halley Froehlich, former NCEAS postdoctoral fellow and current UCSB associate professor, who co-authored the research.
The NCEAS research team didn’t stop there. They also mapped global food consumption to understand potential injustices in how the environmental footprint of food is distributed.
“We use the phrase 'environmental footprint' deliberately: it’s about literally mapping where the impact happens,” said Ben Halpern, lead principal investigator and NCEAS director. “We asked: What does this mean for people beyond their diet and nutrition? We need a better understanding of the consequences of all food production for planetary health."
NCEAS scientists and practitioners initially thought that wealthy countries might displace their environmental footprint onto poorer countries. While their research found that this narrative was not strongly supported, it did reveal that trade patterns and environmental footprints are unevenly distributed. Forthcoming papers begin to answer questions about which countries pay the price for food eaten around the world.
Global partners like WorldFish, which is headquartered in Malaysia, brought deep expertise to the research from a non-Western viewpoint. The WorldFish mission is to work with local and national partners in the Global South to reduce hunger and malnutrition by developing innovative solutions to improve aquatic food systems.
“Large multinationals and powerful governments play a role in setting the global food agenda, but most of the world’s food producers are small-scale and household enterprises in the tropics. Additionally, tropical Asia and Africa are home to the majority of food consumers.
“In this landscape, having rigorous and objective science like the work NCEAS produces is essential. We can't always step back from our work at local and national level to conduct large-scale synthetic studies, but NCEAS is a world leader in this area. They are a valued partner for us because we can’t do this work alone,” said Eddie Allison, principal scientist at WorldFish.
The cumulative food choices of eight billion people put pressure on the planet, often in unexpected ways. This research could help scientists and policymakers anticipate and relieve some of that pressure.
“Research at NCEAS is always driven by the goal of making everything freely available so others can build on it for next-generation work,” said Halpern. “Some might apply our methods to domestic food production in the U.S., while others could use our spatially mapped environmental footprint data to understand its impacts. Hopefully, the world's creative minds will take these data and push them in unexpected directions. That kind of collective innovation is core to our approach at NCEAS."