The real ‘Green’ grocer: Fill your cart with ‘climate smart’ food
Brazilian beef cattle, photo by Scott Bauer (source: ars.usda.gov)
Sweden’s newspaper Sydsvenskan reports on how your diet can influence the climate and how to shop climate smart. Above all: eat less meat. Steak and rice do not qualify, nor do soft drinks, Dutch tomatoes or many other imported foods. The good news is that it turns out it’s much cheaper to be climate smart: almost 40% according to Sydsvenskan’s grocery shopping sample.
‘Since 1990 meat consumption in Sweden has risen by 45% and it isn’t as if we were unhealthy back then. If we can get to that level again we’ll have achieved a lot,’ Says Gunilla Andersson, project leader for Malmö’s office of environmental management, who works with issues relating to both food and climate.
Beef from Brazil or lamb from New Zealand cause the most greenhouse gas emissions because besides producing methane and CO2 from farming and production methods, they also must be transported over great distances. Buying local milk doesn’t help that much either if the cows are fed with soybean meal from Brazil. It is therefore considerably more climate smart to buy organic milk.
Tomato greenhouse in Germany, photo by Goldlocki (source: wikimedia commons)
And neither does eating vegetables put you in the clear as far as the climate is concerned. Cucumbers and especially tomatoes grown in greenhouses require heaters and produce significant emissions. That’s right, ironically greenhouses produce greenhouse gasses, though many Swedish tomato growers have switched to using biofuels – which may or may not be environmentally sound. ‘They still use a huge amount of energy’ according to Gunilla Andersson and it is better to buy organic – or at least conventional – outdoor-grown vegetables that are in season. In Sweden this means local vegetables such as carrots, beets, cabbage and leeks. Not too bad, but wherever you may live might offer something a bit more appealing, like oranges in Portugal, bananas in Costa Rica or olives in Italy. Other tips include buying organic meat (if you have to) and concentrated juice if you don’t live in a particularly ‘fruity’ country.
By Graham Land
Additional resources:
Naturvårdsverket in English – Swedish Environmental Protection Agency
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Tags: climate, climate smart, environmental, greenhouse, greenhouse gas, organic, Sweden
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