Taking a Bite Out of the Environment: Top 10 Most Environmentally Destructive Foods

[undeterred]

If you think your waistline is the only thing being affected by your food choices, it is time to think again. In fact, many of the foods we eat everyday might be causing major damage to the planet. The foods we buy represent a ton of energy and water that we never see as consumers. Looking at a small chocolate bar on a shelf, you only get a quick glimpse into the lifecycle that brought it to that store. Considering the process from farm to production and distribution, that seemingly tiny package proves to have a large environmental footprint.

Taking a deeper look into the lifecycle of some of the most environmentally destructive foods, we came up with a list of the top 10 offenders. By avoiding some of the most harmful foods, you can help limit your own environmental impact and protect the planet in the process.

1. Lamb
According to the Environmental Working Group, every four oz. of lamb consumed is equivalent to driving seven miles in your car. That’s an average of about 20 kilograms of CO2 released into the atmosphere for every pound of lamb. Every 2 pounds of lamb produced requires 2,314 gallons of water.

2. Beef
A close second to lamb, beef production releases the equivalent of driving about 6 ½ miles in your car for every four oz. consumed. It also requires over 2,400 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef.

3. Corn
Cornfields span over 97 million acres in the US—about twice the size of New York State. American cornfields consume over 6 billon gallons of freshwater each year. On average, one acre of corn uses 60 gallons of fossil fuels in production and distribution—that’s more than it takes to fill up the average American car 5 times!

4. Soybeans
Soy’s impact on the environment comes from forest clearing. Forests act like carbon sinks, trapping carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere. In Brazil, the area of forest cleared for soybean plantations is responsible for the release of over 473 million tons of carbon dioxide. Every 2 pounds of soybeans produced requires about 530 gallons of water, one bushel of soybeans weighs about 60 pounds.

5. Palm Oil
Palm oil is a vegetable oil that makes its way into about 50 percent of all consumer goods, so everything from margarine to shampoo to fuels. Deforestation related to palm oil is estimated to contribute more than 558 million metric tons of CO2 to the atmosphere by 2020.

6. Chocolate
Chocolate is a $50 billion industry. As such a powerhouse industry, cacao plantations are responsible for huge amounts of deforestation. A two-ounce bar of chocolate has a carbon footprint of 169grams. A footprint about four times its size. The water footprint of chocolate is about 24,000 liters per kilogram of chocolate.

7. Sugar
According to the World Wildlife Fund, sugar cane production has caused a greater loss of biodiversity than any other crop on the planet. In Florida, the run-off of phosphorus from sugar cane fields is largely responsible for the decline of the Everglades. It can take up to 5,000 gallons of water to grow one acre of sugar cane.

8. Cheese
Considering the energy that is put into the cow that produces the dairy aside from actual production of cheese itself, there is a 1 to 9 ratio of kilograms cheese produced to kilograms of CO2 emissions. For imported cheese, this ratio shoots up to 1 to 19 to account for the carbon cost of air transport. And who doesn’t love an authentic Swiss cheese…

9. Salmon
‘Farmed and Dangerous’: industrial salmon farming is considered the most destructive practice in aquaculture production systems. Most salmon is air shipped, bringing its total carbon footprint equivalent to driving your car three miles for every four oz consumed. The chemicals used to keep salmon ‘healthy’ are put directly into the water, allowing direct passage of antibiotics and pesticides into watersheds.

10. Eggs
In the U.S., egg farmers produce around 79 billion eggs per year. The average 24 oz carton of eggs has a carbon footprint of 5 pounds. The average egg weighs two ounces and has a water footprint of 200 liters. Meaning a dozen eggs boasts a water footprint of 2,400 liters.


http://www.onegreenplanet.org/animalsandnature/most-environmentally-destructive-foods/

[postulater]

1. I give up.

How about pine needles. I have lots of those.

[Incitatus]

8. No

What about all the vegetation and organisms that live off their decomposition?

Have you considered rocks?

[postulater]

10. Sand. It's already broken down and won't

Damage my teeth so much.

I'll need to find a source of fiber though.

[Fumesucker]

28. Pine needles are an excellent source of fiber

[B2G]

2. Avoiding these foods is preposterous

What's left to eat??

Avoiding palm oil alone cuts out 50% of all consumer products. And if they think I'm giving up beef, eggs, cheese, corn & sugar, they're insane.

[pipi_k]

6. What's left...

I'm sure the person above will share his pine needles with us.

and I have plenty of mosquitoes (in the summer only...sorry) I'd be willing to share

[WillowTree]

11. That's my question, too.

[G_j]

14. Palm Oil

Last edited Sun Jan 26, 2014, 03:20 AM - Edit history (1)

Orangutan numbers are plummeting at a dangerously fast rate, all for our sugary, prepackaged snack foods and fragrant, chemical-filled soaps and shampoos. I would hate to think the inconvenience of finding products without it is just too much trouble.

[lunasun]

39. say no and know it's many names!!!!!

Another alternative option for companies is 'sustainable palm oil'. The only issue with sustainable palm oil is that currently, this 'eco-friendly' vegetable oil is sourced through RSPO, an organization which is considered unreliable and untrustworthy by many (read the segment below for more information).

However; even if sustainable palm oil was proven to actually be 'sustainable', why wouldn't all companies use it? Consider two chocolate bars. They both contain palm oil. One uses palm oil sourced from a sustainable plantation, the other uses palm oil from plantations associated with animal genocide and catastrophic deforestation. Which one would you buy? The answer may be obvious to you, but for the global corporate giants of this world, it's a different story.
Because palm oil isn't labelled in many countries, consumers are blinded to the fact that many of the products they are buying contribute to this unprecedented disaster.

One of the lists below consists of well-known products that contain crude palm oil as well as a list of products that contain 'sustainable' palm oil. That way you can have the choice whether to buy them or not.

http://www.saynotopalmoil.com/palm-oil.php

[bluestate10]

29. That was my thought. People can go around only eating environmentally pristine foods,

but their lives would be shit. Why not figure out more innovative methods of raising or growing food that people want to eat?

[Luminous Animal]

43. I go out of my way to eat environmentally "pristine" food and my life isn't shit.

But I am also fortunate to live within walking distance of 2 stores that are pretty serious about sourcing local produce. There's the farmer's market on Wednesdays about a block away and the Saturday market a short underground transit ride away. We also have a great CSA.

I am confused by this, "innovative methods of raising or growing food that people want to eat."

What would that be?

[FSogol]

48. "innovative methods of raising or growing food that people want to eat."

I planted a winter crop of Ho-hos and Twinkies.

Tell me that's not innovative.

[LordGlenconner]

45. Plenty of alternatives to palm oil

Give it a try.....

http://cmzoo.org/docs/palmOilShoppingGuide.pdf

You just might help save one of these...

[undeterred]

3. Its not impossible, it just takes effort.

Eating food that is produced locally is good for the local economy and the environment. Moving away from processed foods helps too.

[pitohui]

9. it's effectively impossible for people who are not in the upper middle class or higher

locally produced food with prices several times the grocery store price is beyond my wallet and i live in one of the cheapest states

the problem with articles like this is that they promote despair, which leads to apathy -- people are being asked to give up basic foods like beef and eggs!

i did not ask to be born, but since i am here, i feel i have a right to eat enough food to sustain life without being made to feel guilty about it

there is no life if every penny i have is spent on food from the farmer's market, i'm better off dead if every thing i earn goes to feeding my face

people have other expenses like housing, health care, etc.

i am going to continue to eat eggs etc and i guarantee you almost everyone reading this article will do the same, all such articles do is promote the idea that it's hopeless to even try to save the environment

[flvegan]

21. No it isn't, unless one is ignorant.

Or lives in an area where it physically isn't possible.

"Basic foods" for the love of God, take a REAL class in nutrition, would you?

[bluestate10]

34. You are right on most of your claims, regardless of what the poster that responded to you

claimed. Local food, on average is two times plus what one spends for volume produced food. Companies like Costco and Albert's Organics are working valiantly to close the gap, but a gap still exists. Local food typically is healthier because farmers practice sustainable, chemical free food that tastes better than the mass produced food.

[starroute]

4. So where are we supposed to get our protein?

If meat, dairy, and soy are all no-no's -- what's left?

And these statistics suggest that the most popular foods are inevitably the most environmentally destructive just because we're growing so much of them -- so presumably if we switched our diet to focus on other things, those would then become the worst.

The basic problem is that there are too many people on the planet. But short of dealing with that that, we need ways to live more sustainably. and this doesn't offer any guidance in that direction.

[Blue_In_AK]

5. Wild Alaskan salmon

is the only kind we eat. It's hard to avoid some of those other things, but we've cut way back.

[pscot]

25. At $17 a pound I can't afford too much of that

I can remember when we had salmon around Puget Sound.

[Blue_In_AK]

27. I wouldn't pay for it, either.

My brother has a boat.

It really shouldn't be so expensive, though.

[marle35]

7. Endangered Species Chocolate

is one of my favorite chocolate brands and doesn't endanger forests. The price is also reasonable for premium chocolate.

[quinnox]

12. Oh, fuck me. Lamb is my all time favorite meat, and

I also love chocolate. And eggs? Forget about it! I eat hard-boiled eggs every day! I love eggs. I also love eggs over easy too. Damn. Just, damn.

[hfojvt]

30. "I say

that anything that eats eggs is a dragon."

says a bird in "Alice in Wonderland"

But they pick on soybeans because of deforestation. Well what about soybeans grown in Nebraska or Kansas?

And what about the sugar that comes from sugarbeets? About 50% of US sugar production , and 35% of world production.

"Of the current world production of more than 130 million metric tons of sugar, about 35% comes from sugar beet and 65% from sugar cane. In the USA, about 50-55% of the domestic production of about 8.4 million metric tons derives from sugar beet. Sugar beet is grown mostly in the temperate zone from plantings made in April and harvested in the fall. Today 11 states and two provinces within four diverse regions are involved with sugar beet production in North America (Figure 1). These areas include the upper Midwest (Minnesota and North Dakota), the far west (California, Idaho, Oregon and Washington), the Great Plains (Colorado, Nebraska, Montana, Wyoming, and Alberta), and the Great Lakes (Michigan and Ontario; Ohio ceased production in 2005)."

http://cropwatch.unl.edu/web/sugarbeets/sugarbeet_history

[duhneece]

13. NOoooooo, not chocolate.

Someone must have made a mistake on that one. It's a medicine. I only eat chocolate for its medicinal effect.

[bvar22]

15. My immediate thoughts too.

Chocolate makes me happy.
Without my Chocolate, I would have to take Prozac,
and where would my Carbon Footprint be THEN!

[duhneece]

44. It feeds my soul...

I consider it medicine and SOUL food.

[greytdemocrat]

16. I like all that stuff.

Not giving it up, sue me.

[MrMickeysMom]

17. The article should have directed itself to the slow food movement...

… because people need to eat and eat well in order to be productive citizens.

Big agriculture business has to be stopped and we must support ONCE AGAIN the family farms that require less travel to delivery.

Also, lots of that corn and soy are for corporate feed lots that turned our food into Omega 6 fat marbled, non-grass fed animals for mass slaughter. And, non of that aggra-business employs permaculture based land use.

It's HOW food is grown that got us into this mess. That and corporate greed that proceeds to ruin land use under the allowance of congress.

[undeterred]

18. Agreed.

And I don't think the list was written to demand that people stop eating all of the above.

But the food production process is largely invisible to consumers. Its not hard to find information on the brutal treatment of animals that are raised for food, but its much less obvious that the way we produce and distribute all kinds of food is environmentally irresponsible.

[MrMickeysMom]

19. Yeah, this isn't a sexy subject, is it?

Yet, we are what we eat, based on how it's produced!

[undeterred]

20. And the more we know, the tougher it gets.

[flvegan]

22. #4. Soybeans. Forests cleared to grow soybeans to feed to livestock.

To make animal protein, not largely for human consumption.

[Rowdyboy]

23. Never fear! A "superfood" being developed by Koch Ind will be introduced soon. Its called

Soylent Green and will take care of world hunger, overpopulation and unemployment all at once!

[jmowreader]

31. Real Soylent Green is sold in bulk, not packaged

And you only get a pound a week. There's serious nutrition in that stuff.

[Kurska]

24. I'm a vegetarian, where on earth am I supposed to get my complete proteins at a reasonable price?

If I can't eat soy.

[totodeinhere]

26. Exactly. Soy beans are a major source of protein for vegetarians. n/t

[lunasun]

35. here?

http://www.theholykale.com/plant-based-protein-chart/
or like this?
http://www.gardenoflife.com/Products-for-Life/Foundational-Nutrition/RAW-Meal.aspx

[jmowreader]

33. Does anyone know how they get the water requirements for a pound of meat?

[Archae]

36. This is a vegan web site.

[Gravitycollapse]

37. And?

[Archae]

38. They have a prejudice against anything non-vegan.

[Gravitycollapse]

40. Yes, many are political vegans. What of it?

Their points appear to be reasonably sourced. Many are from non-vegan sources.

[undeterred]

41. And thats where you would expect to find a list like this.

Being a vegan/vegetarian isn't just about how we choose to relate to animals. Its an effort to be responsible toward the environment and the future of the planet and its inhabitants.

[indie9197]

42. Isn't the CO2 produced by animals already accounted for

in the carbon cycle? Just like burning wood doesnt result in a net increase in CO2

[CBGLuthier]

46. Do have to quibble with number 8 as my preferred cheeses come from goats and sheep

Cow's milk is NOT the only thing they make cheese out of.

[frwrfpos]

47. everything on that list tastes so good

guess i will go back to potato chips. Plain of course