While findings about the environmental impact of the food industry consistently show that diet changes can help reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the primary trigger for such a lifestyle change remains health concerns.

Food production is a key driver of climate change, contributing to it in multiple stages, from farm management, to land conversion, to supply chain management and transport. At the same time, adopting flexitarian (reducing animal protein without fully cutting it out), vegetarian, or standard healthy dietary guidelines can impact GHG emission levels, with a landmark Nature article estimating the reduction by 29% to over 50% compared to business as usual¹.

The EDGAR-FOOD database², covering the period between 1990-2015, provides a rich and thorough overview of GHG emission from the global food system across its full life cycle. The study concludes that the vast majority of emissions happen during production, at farm-level (71%). The other supply chain stages (including processing, packaging, transport, retail, consumption, and waste management) account for the rest (29%). The data gathered for 2015 shows that food systems amount to 34% of total GHG emissions³. Researchers predict that, without targeted interventions, the environmental impact of the food system can increase by 50% to 90% by 2050⁴.

Dietary changes alone cannot address the environmental ticking time bomb of the food system. Improving agricultural technologies to address crop yield, water use, fertilizer efficiency, as well as targeting food waste are also important puzzle pieces⁵. Yet dietary changes are the only intervention easily available to individuals.

One of the proposed dietary changes is a shift to the Planetary Health Diet (PHD) developed by the EAT-Lancet commission⁶ . The PHD is a flexitarian diet with a focus on plant-based food. It’s meant to be healthy, adaptable to cultural preferences and environmentally sustainable. A survey on dietary behaviours of 27 000 Europeans across 27 countries showed that a vast majority fell significantly short of the recommendations of the PHD. Results confirmed an excess of meat and animal fat intake coupled with under-consumption of legumes and nuts⁷.

Nonetheless, the European diet is changing. While strict vegetarianism or veganism is still a minority choice, between 27% and 31% of Europeans self-identify as flexitarians and over 50% report having reduced their overall meat intake. When asked about their motivation, most point to health reasons (47%), with environmental concerns scoring lower (29%)⁸.

The environmental impact of the food system and the role of individual choice is a great illustration of the complexity of environmental issues. Looking at diet changes barely scratches the surface of this complexity. Food is also tied to culture, convenience, purchasing power, and employment, just to name a few factors. An environmentally-conscious diet can only be as successful as its ability to contextualize itself in the complex web of criteria that make up individual choice. And sometimes an environmentally-conscious diet can become popular for non-environmental reasons, as the Smart Protein study shows.