This study analyzed 118 life-cycle assessment (LCA) studies on GHG emissions of food production, considering LCA methods, life cycle phase, waste inclusion, and regional factors, including country, continent, and development status. It found only 22% of studies include waste, revealing up to 39% higher emissions in some categories compared to those excluding waste.

58 academics have joined forces with two NGOs, the Environmental Paper Network and Fern, to draft a letter to MEPs warning them about misleading industry funded studies, including those by McDonald’s and the European Paper and Packaging Association. The letter highlights that the reports directly contradict the European Commission’s Impact Assessment and the UN report on single-use, and are sowing doubt about policies to reduce single-use packaging.

This paper calculates the carbon footprints and dietary quality score of six dietary patterns based on consumption data from the United States: vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian, keto, paleo and omnivorous diets. All of these diets were loosely defined (e.g. vegetarian diets are those with less than 14 grams of meat and seafood per day) to allow some deviation from the strict conventional definitions of these diets. Pescatarian diets scored as the most healthy, and vegan diets had the lowest carbon footprint.

Life cycle assessment (LCA) of food often uses mass of food as a functional unit, i.e. environmental impacts are reported per kg of food. Another common functional unit is weight of protein contained in the food, which is important for comparing different sources of protein, notably meat and its alternatives. This paper goes one step further and examines how protein quality, as opposed to protein quantity, can be accounted for in food LCAs, by using a scoring system to reflect the availability and digestibility of indispensable (i.e. essential) amino acids.

This article in Greenbiz explains and discusses three common concerns about plant-based meat alternatives: that many alternative protein startups do not disclose their product’s environmental impacts; that alternative proteins are unhealthy because they are highly processed; and that alternative protein startups fail to disrupt the power structures of the economic status quo.

This paper examines how uncertainties and assumptions behind assessments of global livestock methane emissions play out as research is translated into policy. The authors argue that the simplification of emissions data (during the aggregation of life cycle analyses into global sectoral estimates) results in a misleading and narrow picture of ruminant livestock.

This book discusses how food systems models can be used to understand both the impacts of agriculture and food across multiple dimensions of sustainability and the ability of the food system to provide nutrition despite global environmental change.

This book uses the principles of Life Cycle Assessment to think about the circular economy. Table readers may be particularly interested in Chapters 10 (on packaging, including food packaging), 11 (agricultural crop production) and 12 (livestock production).