Environmental Impacts of Food Data Explorer

• This interactive resource provides students an opportunity to investigate the environmental impacts of a number of common foods.
• Students can select many different environmental impacts to explore including carbon footprint, land use, water use, scarcity-weighted water use, and water pollution.
• Students can select the foods they are interested in, customize the graphs, and see the relative percent of emissions in each step of the supply chain.

Positives

• It provides data and insights into the many ways our dietary choices affect the planet.
• The website is simple to use.
• The data can be adjusted to show as many or as few foods as you'd like and results can be shown as per kilogram of food, per 100g of protein, or per 1,000 kilocalories.
  

Additional Prerequisites

• Students should know how to read a bar graph and be familiar with the metric system.
  

Differentiation

• Students could learn more about changing their diets or start a Meatless Mondays program at their school.
• Science classes could use this resource for lessons about the carbon cycle, the water cycle, trophic levels, and ecosystems.
  
• Social studies and civics classes could discuss the unequal use of water and land for livestock production, as compared to growing plants.
  

The resource explores greenhouse gas emissions from food sources. It is weighted based on the relative warming impact, and beef appears to have the highest value of kg CO₂ eq among the selected food products. The resource is suitable to guide our food choices to reduce our individual carbon footprint. This is recommended for teaching.