With Sophie KevanyFeeling
Do your New Year’s resolutions include eating better without breaking the bank? If the answer is yes, there is good news ahead. Eating better for you and the planet doesn’t have to be complicated. A new study shows that a healthy, planet-friendly diet doesn’t have to require expensive substitutes or dramatic lifestyle changes. The solution: buy cheaper products from each of the major food groups.
The study models are based on the main food groups listed in Healthy food basket: starchy staples, vegetables, fruit, meat, fish and dairy, legumes, nuts and seeds and oils and fats. Shopping for cheaper food in each of these groups, the study finds, can cut food costs in half while reducing the climate impact of a person’s diet from 2.5kg to 1.6kg of carbon dioxide equivalent. These foods include whole grains, legumes and smaller fish, the study says, while beef and rice are linked to higher emissions.
A planetary diet calculator developed by the Center for Biological Diversity and the University of California (in beta, release TBA) suggests that ideal food-related greenhouse gas emissions are 1.12 kilograms per person each day. People in wealthier countries tend to eat more animal-based products, which have higher nutritional footprints by people in many low- and middle-income countries.
“Choosing less expensive options in each food group can generally help us find foods with lower emissions and foods that generally have a lower environmental impact,” says Elena Martinez, who works at Tufts University. School of Nutrition Science and Policy and is one of the lead authors of the study.
Price-based shopping, he explains, is both simple and attractive to consumers. “Because when we look at grocery shelves, we can’t tell what the greenhouse gas emissions are from the food just by looking at it. And we can’t tell much else about how it’s produced, but we can see how much it costs.”
The differences in price and climate impact between the diets studied are related to the animal protein and starchy foods people choose. The study suggests choosing cheaper, environmentally friendly animal proteins instead of beef (a shift to Chicken can come with animal welfare trade-offs). And instead of rice, which is an affordable staple, but releases a surprising amount of methane as it grows (although less than beef), choose potatoes, wheat, corn or oats. For fruits and vegetables, Martinez says, buy a good variety of the cheapest ones you can find.
Food can be deeply personal and cultural. There are many cuisines for which rice is central, for example. The study suggests that people’s food choices are influenced by a wide range of factors. These can include personal or religious preferences, being too busy to shop and cook from scratch, and some “too persuasive” food marketing that leads people to “more expensive or less nutritious options.”
Based on her own experience at the grocery store, Martinez says, she tends to look for “those lower-cost items that are also mostly raw,” including raw carrots, raw onions, fruit, grains, uncooked flour and oats. In the U.S., he says, that often means looking beyond the main aisles and focusing on the edges of the store where “these kinds of unexciting but nutritious and inexpensive foods are often found.”
When I translate that into practical advice, like when my friends ask me, okay, I don’t have time to cook, take care of my kids, or work long hours. what am i doing I’m thinking of some basic foods that are cheap, low-emissions, and relatively easy to prepare, and again, not those foods that get splashed all over the place. Rather, he says, it might be those “delicious, nutritious foods” that can be turned into good meals relatively quickly, such as canned beans, canned fish, lentils, milk and oats.
And for those who want to avoid animal protein altogether, he advises turning to “cheap, highly nutritious, low-emission plant protein foods,” such as beans, seeds and, of course, lentils, which, crucially for the time-conscious, don’t require soaking.
The New York Times appeared recipes by Nisha Voraof which Rainbow Plant Life YouTube Channelfocuses on plant-based recipes, like crunchy beans with juicy tomatoes over tahini yogurt, often made with food staples.
A range of healthy food scenarios were used to account for the different food choices modeled in the study, including the cheapest, the least emitting and others that used the most common and popular food products from 171 countries.
The diet that included the most commonly consumed foods was estimated to cost $9.96 per person per day, with 2.44 kg of carbon dioxide equivalents, while the cheapest and most environmentally friendly options were $3.68 and 1.65 kg and $6.95 and $0.67 kg, respectively.
Professor Peter Smith of the University of Aberdeen told Sentient in an email that “the common narrative that only the privileged can afford to switch to healthy low-climate foods is simply not supported by the evidence presented here.” Instead, the study shows that “significant cuts” can be made to the climate impact of our daily diet by saving money and eating healthily.
Policymakers, Smith added, could use these findings to help address the twin crises of climate change and nutritional health problems—and the burden of those problems on public health systems—by providing incentives to support affordable, sustainable healthy diets.
So what would Martinez tell a policymaker if he had a few minutes of his attention? “I would go back to what I think this study shows us is why it’s so hard for a lot of people to go on low-carbon diets,” and I’d tell them that part of the solution might be to ask, “What can we do to make these nutritious options the most attractive and easiest option at the grocery store?”
Ways to do this, he says, might include “reducing the amount of marketing we see for unhealthy foods, especially for populations at particularly nutritionally sensitive times in their lives, such as young children.” Another, potentially simpler, move, he says, would be to take action at the grocery store level to make it clearer which foods are better for you and the planet, and which are less so.
Fix: an earlier link to a planetary nutrition computer has been removed as it is not yet publicly live.
This article originally appeared on Sentient at https://sentientmedia.org/budget-friendly-foods-better-for-you-and-the-planet/.
—
This story was originally published by Aesthetic.
***
Sign up for The Good Men Project newsletter
(function($) { window.fnames = []; window.ftypes = []; fnames[0]=’EMAIL’; ftypes[0]=’email’; })(jQuery); var $mcj = jQuery.noConflict(true);
If you believe in the work we do here at The Good Men Project, join us as a Premium Member today.
All Premium members can watch The Good Men Project ADS-free.
Need more information? A full list of benefits is here.
—
Photo source: iStock
The post Affordable food can be better for you and the planet appeared first on The Good Men Project.
