Dinner reservations: how to eat sustainably (and does it even matter?)
Some folks promote local food. Others swear by veganism. But what is the most environmentally-friendly diet? And does it really matter what we eat? Or are there bigger fish to fry when it comes to climate activism?
Outside/In is trying out a new segment called This, That, Or The Other Thing. It’s all about the little decisions we make in life to try and build a more sustainable world – whether they have any effect, and what we can do instead if they don’t.
For our inaugural edition, we’re focusing on food. From Brazilian beef and tofu tacos to food waste and composting, host Nate Hegyi talks with experts to understand how our choices impact the planet… and how we can make a difference in our communities.
Featuring Umair Irfan, Tamar Haspel, and Ben Halpern.
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SUPPORT
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LINKS
Give a listen to Tamar Haspel’s podcast, Climavores.
Vox reporter Umair Irfan wrote about how individual action actually does matter in the fight against climate change.
Scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara put together a big study on the cumulative environmental pressures of different foods.
Want to tackle food waste? The Environmental Protection Agency has a great, down-to-earth guide on what you can do.
CREDITS
Hosted, reported, produced, and mixed by Nate Hegyi
Edited by Taylor Quimby, with help from Justine Paradis, Jessica Hunt, and Felix Poon
Executive producer: Rebecca Lavoie
Music for this episode by Blue Dot Sessions, Sven Lindvall, El Flaco Collective, Future Joust, Spring Gang, Eight Bits, and Awlee.
Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.
If you’ve got a question for the Outside/Inbox hotline, give us a call! We’re always looking for rabbit holes to dive down into. Leave us a voicemail at: 1-844-GO-OTTER (844-466-8837). Don’t forget to leave a number so we can call you back.
Audio Transcript
Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.
Nate Hegyi: Hey this is Outside/In I’m Nate Hegyi here today with Taylor Quimby…
Taylor Quimby: Hello.
Nate Hegyi: Felix Poon.
Felix Poon: Hello
Nate Hegyi: And Justine Paradis.
Justine Paradis: Bah bah bah bah!
Nate Hegyi: Alright, so I’ve gathered all of you here today because I have a quandary. The other day I was walking through my local grocery store - the aptly named Good Food Store.
Taylor Quimby: Wow that’s right to the point.
Nate Hegyi: It’s our rip off Whole Foods, anyways, I was grabbing my sweet potatoes, my…
(in tape): Jalapeno, onion, that one looks a little gross.
And then I get to the meat section and I am faced with a choice. On one side, we have the plant-based impossible burger.
(in tape): Which has a bunch of different ingredients in it.
And then on the other side of the aisle, we have some ground bison that was raised just north of me on the Flathead Reservation.
(in tape) I mean, the buffalo is definitely more expensive. It’s $15.61 vs. $9.99. But it is local.
And I’m faced with a dilemma.
(in tape) I dunno!
Justine Paradis: So your head is twisting, left and right
Nate Hegyi: I’m jumping from one to the other.
Justine Paradis: Like a cartoon?
Nate Hegyi: Which one should I get, which one should I get? But really… which one is actually better for the environment?
Should I go with the vegan one? Or should I go with the local one?
For that matter… Which foods… which diets are really the most sustainable? And also like… does it even matter what we eat? I’m not the only one asking about this. We put out a call for questions on our Facebook page and one of our listeners, Jeannie Bartlett, wondered the same thing.
JB: I’d be really interested in your take on the tradeoffs between locally raised, 100 percent grass fed beef versus plant-based proteins, and I’m interested not just in the carbon tradoffs but also biodiversity, water quality, pesticide use, soil health too.
Nate Hegyi: People want to know their decisions make a difference.
So today on the show, we are launching a new segment that we're calling this, that or the other thing. It's all about the little choices we make in our lives to try and build a more sustainable world, whether they have any effect and what we can do instead if they don't. First up, we are going to try and figure out what the most environmentally friendly diet really is.
Elle James Duncan: I Think the most environmentally friendly diet is a regional diet.
Anonymous: Vegan.
Nate Hegyi:Vegan as well?
Anonymous: Yeah, I’d say vegan.
Mark Troxel: I mean, sustainably, I got I'd love to say wild game because it doesn't really there's no agriculture involved in wild game.
Nate Hegyi: Stay Tuned
Nate Hegyi: The feeling I have after I fried chicken is very much a guilty feeling. That fried chicken is like the most delicious food in the world to me an d then immediately afterwards, I feel like I have a fried chicken hangover. Does that make sense? You guys ever have foods like that?
Felix Poon: What if it was local, humanely raised chicken?
Justine Paradis: But it's not, Felix.That's the thing.
NH So before I try to actually answer this question - I wanted to talk about the strange calculations we all make in the grocery store. The mental gymnastics we jump through to eat what we want and still feel good about it.
Because we all do it, right? It’s hard to be consistent.
Justine Paradis: I have this funny thing where, like I heard once years ago, that shipping by sea is much more efficient than shipping over land. Therefore, if I'm to buy my wine from somewhere, it should be France and not California.
Taylor Quimby: How convenient.
Justine Paradis: Which works out nicely for me because I like French wines better, which makes me sound like insufferable, I'm sure, but..
Felix Poon: I've been doing it wrong all this time. I've been picking wine from California off the menu, thinking like, Well, this is from the same country. It's going to have less fossil fuel transportation costs. But I'm actually oh, my gosh.
Taylor Quimby: Like, for me, I have all these different factors that factor in when I buy food, there's price and then there's sometimes, you know, local food, especially when it's in season. And then there's what I want to cook because I might want to make a very particular meal that requires ingredients that are not possibly local. Like I am vegetarian, but I also buy and cook meat for my son who is not. It is moment by moment in the grocery store.
Justine Paradis: It's like a whole bunch of things you all have to hold in your head and it's all on you.
Taylor Quimby: That that is why I'm anti-guilting is because like we all have to eat and so this isn't like taking a flight you know like a willy nilly flight to Europe and back a bunch of times and sort of saying like, oh gosh, maybe I didn't have to do like we have to eat.
Justine Paradis: It's true. I struggle with it because like I agree with you, Taylor around not guilting but it's sometimes people say like food is food, you know, don't overthink it. And it's like, this is one of the ones that actually does kind of matter.
Nate Hegyi: And so on that note, like, what is, what is your vote, though? Like, what do you think the most sustainable diet is? I'm I'm going to go I think it's it's being locavore.
Justine Paradis: I think it's being vegan.
Nate Hegyi: Vegan?
Justine Paradis: Doesn't doesn't matter the source.
Taylor Quimby: I also think like there's tiers here. Like, obviously this is more complicated than that because you could eat a vegan diet that is also like super unhealthy and full of packaged food.
Justine Paradis: But that wasn't the question.
Nate Hegyi: No, it wasn't the question. We're looking at one narrow aspect of how we eat, one narrow aspect, which is sustainability.
Taylor Quimby: Yeah, yeah. Plant based. I'm going plant based then. Yeah.
Felix Poon: Local vegan. Combine the two.
Justine Paradis: How are you going to do that in Massachusetts, Felix?
Felix Poon: I’m going to eat squash and fruit leathers all winter long.
Taylor Quimby: No more, No more fresh mango, my friend.
Nate Hegyi: Alright, So now it is time to get some answers.
And the first person I spoke with was Tamar Haspal.
Tamar Haspel: I'm a columnist at The Washington Post and a podcaster on Climavores.
Nate Hegyi: Climavores is a podcast that focuses on what we should be eating to help slow the climate crisis. For Tamar… the answer was very clear:
Tamar Haspel: the most environmentally friendly diet is plants.
Taylor Quimby: Episode over!
Tamar Haspel: Plants are just they tread lighter on our earth and they're responsible for way fewer greenhouse gas emissions.
Nate Hegyi: She points to study after study after study that shows that global production of plants has a far smaller footprint than most livestock – especially beef.
Tamar Haspel: Beef is bad for two main reasons. The first is that as cattle eat and digest grass, they produce methane as a byproduct of their digestion. That's called enteric methane. And it's an awful lot of methane. And the second reason might is arguably even more important, and that is that it is beef demand, chiefly that is driving the deforestation in the Amazon and in some other places.
Taylor Quimby: Hm.
Nate Hegyi: Just for listeners who might not know… methane is way more potent than carbon dioxide. And if you are cutting down a massive amount of stored carbon in trees in the Amazon… it’s a double whammy. Especially considering that Brazil is the top exporter of beef in the world and global demand is growing.
Tamar Haspel: So as the world comes out of poverty, which is a very good thing, people eat more meat and they eat more beef and that drives the beef industry to have to grow more beef, they need more land and they cut down the Amazon.
Felix Poon: But what about local, grass-fed beef?
Nate Hegyi: See, Felix, I wondered the same thing – the cattle or in some cases the bison I eat, they aren’t from a recently clear-cut part of the Amazon in Brazil – they are from a ranch just up the road here in Montana. They can’t be that bad.
Tamar Haspel: from a climate perspective, it's not better and it might be worse.
Felix Poon: Might be worse?
Nate Hegyi: So she says it comes down to how long these grass-fed cows are alive.
Tamar Haspel: The faster an animal grows, the less time it's here on this earth burping up methane. And grass fed animals grow significantly more slowly and on a per pound basis, the methane impact of those animals is much higher.
Nate Hegyi: Does that make sense?
Taylor Quimby: Yeah. Although a lot of people won’t be happy with that one.
Nate Hegyi: Something similar is also true for many locally-grown or organic foods.
Like, Felix, when I was thinking about why local might be the better, I was thinking about transportation.
Felix Poon: Right, like you go shopping for apples at the store and they’re being driven across the country from Washington State, which is all the way on the other side of the country.
Nate Hegyi: It’s a lot of gas!
Felix Poon: It’s a lot of gas, yeah.
Nate Hegyi: But studies show that doesn’t actually have a huge impact on the climate. In fact, Tamar says that transportation makes up only about 5% of the total greenhouse gas emissions for many foods.
Justine Paradis: Wow.
Tamar Haspel: And because it's only 5%, it means that that 5% can be more than overcompensated for if you're growing in a place where you're growing less efficiently. I live on Cape Cod and we have local farms, which, by the way, I support and love and go out of my way to shop at. But they don't grow vegetables as efficiently as they grow them in California. The weather isn't right, the soil isn't right, the scale isn't right. So there's no question that the vegetables I buy here are going to have a higher climate impact than the ones I get from California.
Justine Paradis: An inconvenient truth!
Felix Poon: That hurts my local sensibilities.
Nate Hegyi: It hurts mine, too Felix. But when it comes to global emissions… which is what Tamar looks at… it’s all about efficiency. Growing the most calories you can on as little land as possible because that protects more forests and prairies, which are way better at capturing carbon than agricultural fields – even organic ones. In fact, organic farming needs up to 110 percent more land than big, industrialized ag to produce the same amount of food.
So with this in mind, Tamar believes that some of the best climate-friendly foods are… can you guess? There’s two of them.
Felix Poon: Corn and soy.
Nate Hegyi: Oh c’mon felix! You weren’t supposed to guess that. You’re right.
Tamar Haspel: People get angry at me when I write about this. But corn and soy, although, you know, we've we've we've been schooled to hate them and for good reasons. They're grown in these monocultures and there's there's runoff from the fields and pollution and nitrogen loading in in our waterways. But from a food production perspective, they are the best things we have. Corn is the most productive cereal grass and soy is the most productive plant protein. If we ate them, as, you know, tortillas and tofu, it would be the most climate friendly way to feed the planet by a long shot.
Felix Poon: Yeah, Tofu tacos!
Justine: I thought she was going to say lentils.
Nate Hegyi: Lentils definitely are one she also mentions. She’s a huge fan of lentils and pretty much any kind of row crop. So whether it’s sweet potatoes, oats, barley, chickpeas, beans.
When it comes to growing plants, they use comparably less water and fertilizer and they have a high caloric density.
But as you guys are probably thinking… there are some downsides to industrialized agriculture. Emissions aren’t the only factor we ought to be thinking about when it comes to eating sustainably. There’s habitat loss, pesticide use. These are what are known as cumulative environmental pressures. And, after the break, we are going to look at a brand new study – one of the first of its kind – that actually ranked foods based on these cumulative environmental pressures. And the results were pretty surprising.
Justine Paradise: I’m so curious
Nate Hegyi: But before we go we wanna know… what is your biggest roadblock when it comes to eating more sustainably? Is it money? Family dynamics? Health? What about ethical farm labor? Shoot us an email at outsidein@nhpr.org or leave us a voicemail at 1-844-GO-OTTER.
Welcome back to Outside/In, I’m Nate Hegyi, here with Justine Paradis, Felix Poon and Taylor Quimby, and we are doing a trial run of a new segment we’re calling This, That, and The Other thing. We’re trying to figure out what the most environmentally-friendly diet is and to help us out I brought in this guy.
Ben Halpern: Yeah hi I’m Ben Halpern I'm a professor here at the Brand School of Environmental Science and Management at UC Santa Barbara
Nate Hegyi: So, a few years ago Ben was like a lot of us. Trying to figure out the most sustainable way to eat.
Ben Halpern: So I gave up all meat because I read in the news, you know, the meat is not so great for the environment. And I figured, you know, this is a way that I can make a difference daily in what I do
Nate Hegyi: But then he was like, well:
Ben Halpern: Wait a minute, You know, I'm a scientist. I should really make sure I understand what the data tell me. So I started digging around and there really wasn't the right kind of information that I wanted to make my decision. So thus started down this four year path of pulling together a lot of data and trying to figure this all out.
Nate Hegyi: He and his team were one of the first to rank foods based on their cumulative environmental pressures.
Ben Halpern: So a lot of studies have looked at just climate emissions or just water use or just pollution, and those tell only one part of the story. We wanted to know what the cumulative pressure of all those things together mean for food production's impact on the planet.
NH; And some of the results of his study were actually kind of surprising. Sure, globally cows were still pretty bad.
Ben Halpern: But when you add all these things together, other foods start to creep up that that list of things that aren't so great for the planet like pigs or rice or wheat, things that people probably haven't been paying as much attention to.
Taylor Quimby: Wheat?
Felix Poon: What? The most delicious things in the world.
Nate Hegyi: So I wanna start with pigs. globally, they produce lower greenhouse gas emissions than cows, but they contribute way more pollution in the form of waste and runoff, which can create things like toxic algae blooms and destroy lakes, rivers. They can wreak havoc on biodiversity. Then there’s rice and wheat. Both of those crops are actually really water intensive. Rice production in particular actually has a pretty big footprint when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions.
Rice is one of the most grown crops in the world and farmers will often either burn their fields after harvest or they will flood them to help the stalks decay… which releases methane.
Justine Paradis: Well also, they just, I just today saw they just developed a rice variety after decades of work and the idea is not doing these things, burning fields after harvest and not tilling.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah There’s lots of cool innovations happening in the world of agriculture. I think it’s also important to remember that this isn’t how most food is produced right now. That said… there are some bright spots from Ben’s study. Obviously a lot of other vegetables… including corn and soy. But also…
Ben Halpern: Things like shellfish can have a positive benefit for the environment.
Felix Poon: This is the best news I’ve heard all day. All year. All my life.
Ben Halpern: It produces it creates habitat that other creatures can live in and it actually sequesters, pulls carbon into its shell and locks that up. So it's doing it's like fighting climate change just by growing so you can actually eat shellfish basically guilt free because it is it is not only not hurting the environment, it might actually be helping the environment and giving you food.
Nate Hegyi: I also wanna squeeze in one more super eco-friendly meat that is near and “deer” to my heart that both Tamar and Ben suggested.
Justine Paradis: What do you think you’re going to say after?
Nate Hegyi: Is it perhaps… deer?
Tamar Haspel: So here on the East Coast, white tailed deer are way over populated in a whole bunch of places, and they do significant ecological damage. So when you take one of those deer, you're actually improving the ecosystem rather than making it worse, both because the deer does damage and because the deer is responsible for methane. So you're taking a methane producer out of production.
Felix Poon: It’s time to learn to hunt!
Nate Hegyi: And maybe this is our conclusion for the most environmentally friendly diet. A tofu taco eating son of a gun who occasionally shoots a deer and spends late nights at the oyster bar.
Taylor Quimby: Mostly vegan…
Justine Paradis: With exceptions for shellfish and venison.
Nate Hegyi: And a staple diet that mainly consists of efficiently grown row crops. But that menu also might not be accessible for everyone. Like, hunting takes time and money… some people are allergic to shellfish… even tofu can be hard to find at a corner store.
Taylor Quimby: I’ve been having a hard time finding Tempeh at my store. They never have tempeh at my store any more.
Nate Hegyi: Really? That’s a bummer. So if you’re only in a position to make one or two changes to eat more sustainably…. Try this. First… cool it on the beef. Here’s Tamar Haspel, the food columnist.
Tamar Haspel: even if you're buying from the ranch up the road that isn't responsible for deforestation, beef demand is fungible and every steak you don't eat subtracts one steak from the global demand.
Also, try not to waste food.
Tamar Haspel: because fully a third of the food that we grow never gets eaten. It gets thrown away and that's huge.
And so this brings to the “other thing” of our new segment ‘this that or the other thing.’ Does it really matter what I, as an individual, choose to eat? Like, should I even be worrying about food. This is something you brought up, Justine, when we were pitching this idea.
Justine: I don’t mean to be a wet blanket but I don’t think we should be doing this at all.
Nate Hegyi: Why?
Justine: I don’t think we should be doing this – and I don’t mean necessarily mean food but this conceit – because the focus on ‘this, that or the other thing’ is a distraction from systemic changes that need to happen which we have heard a millions times… but I think that by doing it we give people an option to check that box and let myself off the hook ethically here.
Felix Poon: Yeah, fossil fuel companies have used this as a corporate strategy. Like, they want us worrying about your diet and our individual carbon footprint if that means they don’t have to worry about it.
Taylor: But isn’t it like the improv comedians would say, ‘yes, and…’Like you could spend years working on grassroot efforts or systemic changes but in the meantime you could also just lead by example and I think people want to know how to do that, we get so many questions in that vein.
Nate Hegyi: And that’s what everybody I talked to said, they all said the same thing. It’s both. Essentially, individual action needs to work in tandem with larger scale stuff like advocating for policy changes or legislation. But, like, it still matters.
Umair Irfan: if a few thousand people make a tiny change in their diet, that aggregates to a major change in overall demand.
Nate Hegyi: Umair Irfan is a senior correspondent with Vox. He covers science. He compares your personal choices to voting.
Umair Irfan: I mean, it feels like as an individual just by yourself, you're not going to move the needle. But in aggregate that’s really where you see some of the largest gains that you can actually make. Even bigger than big institutions.
Taylor Quimby: So it’s great that individual choices can make a difference. That’s great to hear. But like, I feel like I’ve taken my personal choices, when it comes to food, not maybe as far as I’ll ever take them – I’m pretty square with where I am right now – whereas I am unsure, in a lot of ways, when it comes to food systems, like how I can be even more impactful on that bigger level, that community level. That’s where I feel unsure.
Nate Hegyi: That’s a great point and to answer it I really wanna focus on food waste. It is the third largest greenhouse gas emitter in the country because when food rots it produces methane.
And we toss out about a third of all the food we buy or grow. And the ‘we’ is not just you and me, but grocery stores, restaurants, farms. So the question is, like, how do we reduce that waste?
So I wanna give you guys a few tips. FIRST - you can donate or volunteer at your local food bank or food rescue organization. They take still-good-but-unwanted food from grocery stores and restaurants and deliver it to hungry families.
Taylor Quimby: Ok
Nate Hegyi: Speaking of grocery stores and restaurants… you can urge them to donate to food banks if they aren’t already. And you could ask them to conduct a waste audit. So a waste audit is where a business takes a hard look at how much food they are buying vs. selling. It can help reduce waste and save them cash.
And you don’t have to engineer this from scratch - the whole thing about collective action, is that a lot of times you just have to look for local organizations that are already doing stuff like this and ask how you can help.
Justine: What about composting services?
Nate Hegyi: So composting is better than throwing old or bad food away into a landfill. That’s because the process produces way less methane. But there’s also another cool trash solution I wanna talk about. It’s called anaerobic digestion, have you ever heard of it before?
Taylor Quimby: Sounds like what I do after a big meal.
Nate Hegyi: Sounds kinda gross, doesn’t it?
Felix Poon: Almost sounds like an exercise routine.
Nate Hegyi: So it’s where food scraps are broken down in an oxygen deprived, gas-sealed unit called a digester. and the resulting gasses are captured and burned as fuel for engines or furnaces. Are you familiar with Stop and Shop grocery store chain?
Felix Poon: They’re everywhere.
Justine Paradis: They have a monopoly in my hometown.
Nate Hegyi: Very east coast.
Justine Paradis: Very east coast.
Nate Hegyi: So they actually have an anaerobic digester that turns food waste into power for one of its distribution warehouses. I Should say that there is some criticism about these digesters because they do release some greenhouse gasses when the fuel is burned. But it’s a lot less than if the food just rotted.
Taylor Quimby: And you’re getting something out of it. Rotten food in a landfill accomplishes nothing.
Felix Poon: And presumably you’re not burning fossil fuels to keep your factory warm.
Nate Hegyi: Instead you’re burning old bananas.
Felix Poon: Banana power.
Nate Hegyi: So you could petition your city council or local grocery store chain to buy an anaerobic digester.
There’s also stuff you can do beyond food waste, right? Like Tamar Haspel, she loves the efficiency of industrialized agriculture but wants to see it get kinder to the environment.
Tamar Haspel: you know, there's nothing wrong with growing things at scale. In fact, it has to happen for us to be able to feed 8 billion people. So we have to really focus on what growing at scale with minimal environmental impact looks like.
Nate Hegyi: Again, you don’t have to figure out what that means on your own. You can look for folks who already talking about these issues and go from there.
So are you guys feeling good about this?
Taylor Quimby: I think that last point helps a lot for me. I will be more impactful if I have developed relationships with other human beings and we brainstorm and put our efforts together. That’s nice.
Felix Poon: I get that but I wonder if I can play devil’s advocate here.
Taylor Quimby: Boo.
Felix Poon: I think the reason why people focus on individual choices at the grocery store is because it’s already something we encounter on a regular basis. It’s a heavier lift to look for these organizations or start this work on my own. It’s just… how can we make it easier?
Taylor Quimby: I don’t know if it can be.
Justine Paradis: I don’t know that it is. I think this is a shift in thinking of what it means to be a citizen.
TQ; I think the food bank thing is nice because if I think about how I wanna be helpful in my community about food insecurity. That’s something I’ve done and I know I can make a difference. And part of the problem with climate action is ‘I don’t know if I can make a difference.’ And what this reminds us is that some of these other things are important. You don’t have to be Greta, you don’t have to revolutionize stuff, you can also take pride in knowing that helping out in your community is part of the climate effort. And maybe that’s an incentive to do it, because it’s approachable.
CREDITS
We’ll have links to Ben’s study, Umair’s article and Tamar’s podcast Climavores in the show notes. Tamar also recently published a book called Boldly Grow: Finding Joy, Adventure and Dinner in your own backyard.
The voices you heard at the top were Ellie James Duncan, Mark Troxle, Chris Ryan, and a couple of people that wouldn’t give me their names because I probably made them feel awkward because I was asking random people questions in front of a grocery store…
Anonymous: What was your guys’ names? We’re gonna skip on that… Totally!
Nate Hegyi: Today’s episode was edited by Taylor Quimby, with additional editing help from Justine Paradis, Jessica Hunt, and Felix Poon.
Outside/In’s executive producer is Rebecca Lavoie.
Music in this episode came from Blue Dot Sessions, Sven Lindvall, El Flaco Collective, Future Joust, Spring Gang, Eight Bits, and Awlee.
Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.
Taylor Quimby: That’s my favorite band name in there, Future Joust
Nate Hegyi: Future Joust is cool.
Taylor Quimby: Future Joust.