Welcome to the Carbon Table

The goal of this project is to help you better understand the carbon footprint of the foods you eat.
That's important because if you live in a developed country, roughy 24% of your annual carbon footprint is from your diet, and by 2030 we all need to reduce our annual footprint to a fraction of what it is now.

No one-thing is going to get us there. If you have a low carbon diet but fly a lot, or the world keeps making steel* it's still not enough.
But the key to creating change in the world is focusing on those things you can control, and your diet is very much one of those things.

How to use the Carbon Table

There are 2 sections to this project. You can:

Check the carbon footprint of an individual ingredient

Check the carbon footprint of a popular recipe / our low-carbon version of a popular recipe

...that's it.

A note on the data

Obviously not all food in all places is made exactly the same, the world is not that uniform. But to make things easy we've taken lots of data (see 'Sources') and worked out a best approximation. The most difficult thing is actually vegetables. A lot of vegetables are grown in fields, however sometimes they are also grown in heated greenhouses which really increases their carbon footprint ...and makes our life harder. However the headline remains the same, even in heated greenhouses vegetables have a much, much lower footprint than meat.

Another question we had is: "what about importing food from far away?" Here again it's difficult. We don't know where you live, so we haven't worked out the fuel needed to get food to your local store, just up to the point it leaves the farm. However, even if you're eating berries from the other side of the world, unless that berry had a 1st class seat on its own private jet, the carbon footprint is still going to be a lot lower than the local steak you have for dinner.

Some parting advice

From working on this project the best advice we have for anyone trying to reduce the carbon footprint of their diet, (but doesn't want to go fully meatless) is:

Eat as little red meat as possible.

Eat more fish and less meat in general.

If you have to use beef mince, halve the amount and substitute it with cooked green lentils (this will cut the carbon footprint of most red-meat meals in half).

Avoid wasting any food.

Now....let's cook!

*making steel is one of the highest polluting activities after burning fuels for energy