I’m Cutting Back on Carbon—It Goes Straight to My Hips.

The nutrition information now posted on menus all over New York has been powerful enough to scare me away from several guilty pleasures, including Starbucks and Chipotle. Even without meat, cheese, or sour cream, a burrito from this chain packs up to 870 calories. No thanks, I’ll have a salad instead. In Sweden, a fast-food burger chain called “Max Burger” is trying to reproduce this effect by publishing the carbon footprints of its food offerings. Although the restaurant, which serves mostly meat-based items, isn’t going vegetarian, they have filled their menu with “less meat” options, such as a half-soy/half-beef burger. According to the Institute for Environmental Assessment, the production of 1 kilogram of beef emits the equivalent of 8.9 kg of CO2 into the atmosphere, while 1 kg of fruits or vegetables emits only 2.5 kg. Considering these numbers—and the growing concern over global climate change—the question is whether carbon labeling can be effective, and if less meat will still be too much.

Although Max Burger claims to be “the first restaurant chain in the world to publish CO2 emissions on its menu,” they aren’t the first ones to market low-carbon products to consumers. In 2007, the UK’s Carbon Trust established the Carbon Label Company, now the Carbon Trust Footprinting Company. This company aims to help businesses label products and reduce their carbon footprints, and guide consumers towards climate-friendly purchases. In November, South Korea announced its collaboration with the Climate Trust and became the most recent nation “to adopt an international standard on carbon labeling.” The most contentious aspect of carbon footprinting is establishing a consistent, accurate measurement that can trace the complex route of a product from production, manufacturing, and consumption. There are plenty of sources online that provide calculators to determine an individual’s (or family’s) footprint—and each one of them is different. (Here are two, from the Nature Conservancy and the EPA.) It’s going to be very challenging to convince people to make personal food choices based on their intangible climate footprint, especially when many of the foods people love most—like meat—have the highest carbon emissions. It’s even harder without a universal method or tool that can consistently measure the footprint of specific food products.

Photo courtesy of Ruminatrix