Vegetables | TableDebates

People, Plate and Planet – new report and online tool for sustainable diets

The Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) has launched a new report on sustainable diets - People, Plate and Planet, describing dietary choices that can reduce greenhouse gas emissions and pressures on land. The report considers nutrition, GHG emissions and land use and states that the most significant impact on these areas comes from what we eat, not where it is from or how much packaging there is around it.

Are the Dietary Guidelines for Meat, Fat, Fruit and Vegetable Consumption Appropriate for Environmental Sustainability? A Review of the Literature

This paper provides a review of the current literature analysing environmental impacts of dietary recommendations. The review focuses on three aspects of dietary advice in particular: reducing the consumption of fat, reducing the consumption of meat-based protein and animal-based foods, and finally increasing the consumption of fruit and vegetables. It then reviews the environmental impact assessments and Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) that have been undertaken in foods that have relevance to these three dietary recommendations.

The Australian Guide to healthy eating

This blog by Daniel Tan, Senior Lecturer in Agriculture at University of Sydney, discusses how one might eat both healthy and sustainably.

Reducing waste from post-harvest losses; Gratitude project mid-term review reveals unexpected findings

Vertical farming: World's largest indoor vertical farm opens

A new 90,000-square-foot indoor farm called FarmedHere has recently opened in Chicago and is expected to produce 1 million pounds a year of organic greens like basil, lettuce, mint, and spinach. It is also expected that it will provide hundreds of local jobs.

Paper: Gender as a factor in an environmental assessment of the consumption of animal and plant-based foods in Germany

An interesting paper confirming what intuition might suggest – that men’s diets have a higher GHG burden than women’s because, (even allowing for the fact that men generally need to eat more) they tend to eat more meat; women’s diets are more water demanding due to their greater consumption of fruit and vegetables (the study looks at irrigation water rather than overall water).

Fruit and vegetable consumption falls in the UK

Fruit and vegetables and UK Greenhouse Gas emissions: Exploring the relationship

This paper considers what we know about the contribution that the fruit and vegetable sector makes to the UK's greenhouse gas emissions. It also looks at what we know about the options for achieving emissions reductions.

Comparison between processed ready and home-made meals

A life cycle comparison between processed ready meals and their home-made equivalent were published in a special edition of the journal Ambio (Ambio: A Journal of the Human Environment, vol. xxxiv number 4-5 June 2005). The conclusions are that there's not a lot to choose between the two. The home cooked meal used slightly less energy but generated slightly more GHG emissions (a result of different waste disposal assumptions).