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Costs, how much does what we eat really cost?

2024-10-14 11:13:00Lifestyle SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX

Costs, how much does what we eat really cost?

Filling your supermarket trolley certainly isn't cheap: what if we told you that, to reflect the impact they have on the environment, some foods should cost a lot more? The New York Times asked True Price, a Dutch non-profit company, to estimate the ecological costs of some foods produced and sold in the US.

The objective is not to actually make the consumer pay more, but rather to make him realize how much what he buys really costs and allow him to choose foods with a lower environmental impact. "These costs are reflected in health care, in climate change adaptation strategies and all this in taxes. They are not imaginary", underlines Claire van den Broek, CEO of True Price.

In their assessments, True Price experts considered three categories: greenhouse gas emissions, water consumption and land use. The food with the biggest environmental impact turned out to be nothing surprising: beef, with an estimated real cost of about $55 per kilogram, compared to $11 for which it is sold at large supermarket chains like Walmart.

One reason is that cattle are very inefficient at converting what they eat into body weight, and for every 100 grams of protein they eat, they produce only 4. However, most of the environmental cost comes from the amount of land used to grow the food. . that feeds cattle. Where it is produced also matters: Beef production in the United States requires more than twice as much land as in Europe.

At about $7 per kilogram in consumer price and $16 in real cost, it earns a surprising second place, placing itself ahead of chicken and pork in the ranking of the most polluting foods. The reasons are similar to beef, because it always involves cows (as well as goats and sheep): methane emissions related to poor ruminant digestion, but above all land use related to food production. Added to this is the high water consumption of dairy cows (which drink up to 200 liters a day!).

Chicken has a significantly lower environmental cost than beef and pork (about $9 per kilogram compared to the current selling price of $5), partly because chickens are smaller and grow faster, but also because they shed less methane because they are not ruminants. The conversion of ingested food into produced meat is also more efficient (about one kilogram of chicken for every two meals), but this efficiency comes at a cost: the welfare of intensively farmed animals.

We end up with two vegan foods, tofu and chickpeas: the first has only 50 cents of environmental costs that are not reflected in the consumer price, stemming mainly from emissions from the industries that transform soy into tofu; in this case, the country of origin must also be taken into account: American crops do not grow in recently deforested lands, while Brazilian ones do. Chickpeas are the cheapest option (for us and for the planet) if we want a protein food with low environmental cost: they require very little water and little fertilizer to grow, and most of the production and consumption takes place in India. The analysis took into account dry chickpeas, which require longer rehydration and cooking times, so some environmental costs (not considered by True Price) may be borne by the consumer.

The objective of this analysis, underlines the New York Times, is certainly not to make the consumer pay more, but simply to give him the opportunity to choose: next to the amount to be paid at the checkout, for example, we can find such . which also reflects the environmental costs of that particular product and allows us to choose more consciously what we buy and eat.


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