Energy We Throw Away: Food and Climate Change

An avocado travels approximately 12,000 kilometres by air, sea, and land before reaching our breakfast table, while a single cup of coffee has a water footprint of around 140 litres. These figures—measuring natural resources, transport distances, and kilograms of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere—help us understand the true cost of the food we consume.

At the same time, they encourage us to consider what our food choices mean for climate change and how changing our everyday habits can have a positive impact on the planet.

Food and Energy: Eating Fossil Fuels

Throughout the relatively short history of Homo sapiens on this planet, the ways people have obtained food have changed dramatically. For roughly 338,000 years, humans survived by hunting and gathering, while agriculture emerged only around 12,000 years ago. Even today, there are communities that continue to obtain food without cultivating it—primarily Indigenous peoples living in different parts of the world.

Hunting and gathering are often assumed to be inefficient ways of securing food. However, anthropological research suggests otherwise. Studies have shown that hunter-gatherer societies can obtain food up to one hundred times more efficiently than societies that rely on industrial food production. Hunter-gatherers typically spend only three to four hours a day obtaining food and use approximately one kilocalorie of energy to produce ten kilocalories of food. By comparison, the working day on industrial farms in the United States is generally at least eight hours long, and producing one kilocalorie of food requires around ten kilocalories of energy.

How can such a striking difference in efficiency be explained? Industrial food production relies on a highly mechanized system made up of multiple stages, each of which requires additional energy. Energy costs are further increased by the fact that food is often transported thousands of kilometres before it reaches consumers.

For example, an avocado grown in Peru travels more than 12,000 kilometres by road, sea, and air before arriving in Lithuania, while a mango from Seville travels approximately 3,700 kilometres. These are just two examples of the vast distances food often covers within the global food system.

Journalist Richard Manning famously remarked that "we eat oil." His observation highlights the fact that nearly every stage of modern food production—from cultivation and processing to packaging, refrigeration, and transportation—depends on fossil fuels. In today's global food economy, the food we consume is inseparable from the energy required to produce and move it around the world.

Simply put, the farther our food is from a grandmother's garden, the more stages of production, packaging, and transportation it has likely undergone. To understand the true environmental cost of food, we need to consider every step in its journey: cultivation (including the production of fertilizers and other agricultural inputs), harvesting, sorting, mechanized washing, processing, packaging, transportation at each stage, storage, and, ultimately, waste management.

Finally, it is important to remember that food that is not purchased or consumed before its expiry date often ends up in landfill—serving as a reminder of the energy invested in its production and transport, and of a culture of waste.

Meat: From Tropical Rainforests to Our Table

The role of transportation and mechanization in food production—and their contribution to climate change—is becoming increasingly well understood and widely discussed. Less frequently addressed, and often met with greater resistance, is the environmental impact of animal-based foods, particularly meat, and the significant role they play in shaping ecosystems.

According to 2018 data, the average person in the United Kingdom consumed approximately 38 kilograms of meat per year. In recent decades, global meat consumption has increased disproportionately as dietary habits have changed, and projections suggest that this trend will continue.

Importantly, this growth cannot be explained solely by population increase. Although the world's population continues to grow, meat consumption is rising most rapidly in countries where population growth is relatively stable. Current consumption trends therefore do not support the claim that increasing meat consumption is simply a consequence of global population growth.

The Earth's supply of arable land and freshwater is limited. As livestock farming and agricultural production continue to expand, the demand for fertile land has increased accordingly. In many regions, new farmland and grazing areas are created by clearing tropical and subtropical forests and destroying mangrove ecosystems.

Although many food companies and multinational corporations have pledged not to source livestock from farms established through the clearing or burning of areas such as the Amazon rainforest, investigative journalism has shown that the true origin of cattle is often concealed through complex supply chains and repeated transfers between farms before the animals enter the market.

Researchers in the United Kingdom have also linked the expansion of the meat industry to the large-scale decline of seagrass meadows along the country's coastline. Scientists are now working to restore these underwater ecosystems because, like tropical rainforests and mangrove forests, seagrasses play a crucial role in mitigating climate change by absorbing and storing carbon dioxide.

Finally, meat production is an extremely energy-intensive process. It is estimated that producing one kilogram of industrially farmed beef requires approximately 14 kilograms of grain, and can result in the release of up to 335 kilograms of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The Lithuanian Consumer Institute notes that producing a single small hamburger requires around 2,400 litres of water.

Can I Change Anything?

The alarming statistics and distances are not intended to provoke guilt or shame. Rather, they aim to encourage reflection on how each of us can change at least some of our food consumption habits and why individual contributions matter in this process.

Each year, approximately 88 million tonnes of food are wasted in the European Union alone, while globally, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), around 1.6 billion tonnes of food are wasted.

Within the European Union, the largest share of food waste occurs at the household level, with food discarded by households accounting for more than half of all food waste. The State Food and Veterinary Service of Lithuania notes that, on average, one person in Lithuania wastes around 60 kilograms of food per year.

The enormous scale of food waste—and the resources used to produce the food that is ultimately discarded—has inspired numerous educational initiatives aimed at raising awareness of more sustainable eating habits and reducing waste.

Among the recommended practices are buying and preparing only as much food as needed, shopping with a list, learning how to revive wilted vegetables, creating meals from leftovers, freezing and preserving fruits and vegetables, and adopting other everyday strategies to reduce food waste.

There are also specific initiatives, such as locavorism (from the English term locavore), which encourages people to choose locally grown seasonal fruits and vegetables in order to reduce the carbon footprint associated with transportation.

Other movements promote the purchase of imperfect fruits and vegetables. Large quantities of produce that do not meet market-driven aesthetic standards are discarded every year, as only “perfect-looking” products are selected and offered to consumers.

All of these practices encourage more sustainable consumption. In addition to their environmental benefits, they also have economic advantages: by planning purchases, consuming more responsibly, and wasting less, we can also save money.

Looking further along the consumption and waste chain, efforts are being made to find sustainable ways of managing food waste. For example, the Klaipėda Regional Waste Management Centre encourages residents to compost unavoidable organic waste. The centre provides compost bins for those who need them and has prepared guides explaining how to compost and how to build a composting system at home.

Sustainable Practices and Quarantine

When quarantine began in Lithuania, advocates of sustainable practices discussed whether it would lead to an increase in food waste compared to previous years. In the first days, it was observed that people were clearing store shelves of longer-lasting products, particularly grains, pasta, and canned goods. These consumer behaviours suggested that food waste volumes might increase.

On the other hand, recommendations to leave home less frequently and, whenever possible, buy groceries for a longer period at once could encourage people to plan their meals more carefully and make more intentional purchases.

The relationship between contemporary food consumption patterns, food production processes, and climate change was explored during the workshop “Food: No Longer (Just) Food”, organized this year by the applied anthropology organization Anthropos for 9th–12th grade students from schools in Kaunas, Vilnius, and Klaipėda.

The project is funded through the initiative “Greetings, Food” by the Lithuanian Consumer Institute, which receives partial funding from the European Union.

Prepared by "Anthropos"
Photo - Emilija Norkutė-Adamonė