what we eat has a profound impact on our health and the health of our planet
there are so many different theories on what's right or wrong that food and
eating can become just another stress factor do we really all need to become
vegan or follow the paleo or keto diet it all adds up to the impression that we
are what we eat and it's getting more and more difficult to decipher what a
sustainable diet really is a recent report put together by the United
Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that of all human
activities that emit greenhouse gases like industry or transportation
agriculture and logging account for nearly a quarter of total emissions more
than 80% of farmland is used for livestock compared to just 20% for
vegetables and wheat but meat and dairy products only account for 18 percent of
the calories and 37 percent of the protein wheat that is extremely
inefficient we're using all this land to produce only a fraction of global human
nutrition this means that the amount of farmland in general could be drastically
reduced
making space for forests and wildlife
putting ethical and health aspects aside the question is what is a sustainable
diet today and what can I do making conscious food choices is a small step
to make a huge impact if you ate one hamburger every week over the span of an
entire year you'd cause 604 kilograms of co2 emissions that's the same as taking
a flight from New York to Miami
producing all those burgers requires
1735 square meters of farmland an area equal to six tennis courts but if you go
without that one weekly burger you're reducing your annual greenhouse gas
emissions by 604 kilograms we talked to Danielle nürnberg an expert on
sustainable agriculture and food is not meat consumption but a lack of diversity
there needs to be an emphasis on sort of reducing and refining what kinds of meat
we eat you know industrial factory farmed meat it might be cheap at the
grocery store but it's really expensive in terms of pollution costs or public
health costs or the impact on soils and in the land itself as well as greenhouse
gas emissions that come from industrial animal production we need to just
support the small and medium scale farmers who are trying to produce me in
the right way so what kind of diet is good for us and good for the planet
if we all shifted away from animal-based foods and chose diverse local products
it would help immensely with meeting the Paris agreement target of limiting the
average global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees
the recipe is simple local diverse mostly plants with a few simple changes
what we eat can help protect our planet