Food

Food provides each human with 2000kcal of energy and building materials for the body. The food system has an energy output of 20 trillion kcal/y, or 25,000 TWH (oil is 50,000 TWH). Despite the energy of food coming from the sun and the soil, the system is highly inefficient: it uses around 30% of the world's energy supply, and is responsible for at least 26% of the world's CO2 output.

Beef and dairy responsible for 80% of Amazon deforestation and together food systems also uses almost 50% of the Earth's habitable land:

Food is the biggest contributor to climate change after the energy industry. In comparison, aviation is responsible for 2-5% of global warming. Agriculture is also the main responsible for the global decline of ecosystems.

Finally, food and drink is responsible for the majority of plastic waste.

Solutions

Dietary choices can make a huge difference. The action with the single biggest difference to the environment that most of us can make right now is to go vegan.

Bringing about an ideal world, where we eat vegan and choose responsibly produced products from their local farm shop, is much easier said than done.

Solutions are required to increase awareness of the impacts of food, so that we can start making more conscientious decisions towards it. Solutions are required to make appealing products with lower impacts, and to make existing low impact products more appealing. And we must also find alternatives to plastic packaging that can be implemented on a large scale.

Change can occur through individuals, businesses, policy makers, and investors. Organisations must use levers such food labels, nudges and social technologies. We hope that in the coming years the pace of change in food can match what humanity is achieving in other sectors.

Ecobite's role

Ecobite is developing a food application infused with ecological and health information, to make it easy for anyone to improve their diet in terms of ecological impact, in the same way as many of us already do with nutrition.