When world leaders meet in Copenhagen in a few weeks to talk about climate change, most of the emphasis will be on emissions from power plants, factories and automobiles.
But along with those issues, environmentalists have raised alarms about another side of human behavior: not what we heat, but what we eat.
Everything about food, from production to transportation to purchase, is coming under scrutiny.
In Brazil, Greenpeace persuaded four of the world’s largest meat producers last month to stop buying cattle from newly deforested areas of the Amazon. Greenpeace says Brazil’s cattle industry is the biggest culprit in global deforestation, cutting down rain forest trees for grazing land.
Marcelo Furtado, executive director of Greenpeace in Brazil, told Alexei Barrionuevo of The Times, “This agreement shows that in today’s world, someone that wants to be a global player cannot be associated with deforestation.”
There are also rising concerns about the impact of hauling foods long distances - whether it makes sense, for example, to ship fish and chicken from the United States to Asia for packaging and then back to American supermarkets, burning fuel along the way. The “locavore” movement encourages people to buy food grown and produced nearby. As a reader, Carrie Cizauskas, wrote in response to a Times blog request for “food rules” to live by, “Don’t eat anything that took more energy to ship than to grow.”
Some food banks in California, which provide groceries to the needy, are making deals with neighborhood farms for fresh produce, rather than accepting leftover or damaged packaged goods from stores and wholesalers. The motive is mostly nutritional, to provide low-income people with healthy food, The Times reported, but it also cuts back on long-distance delivery.
And the United States and Europe are talking about going local in their aid programs to Africa, by helping to build indigenous farms instead of simply shipping food across the ocean. “We are trying to shift away from emergency aid toward agricultural development,” Philip J. Crowley, a United States State Department spokesman, told Neil MacFarquhar of The Times at a food conference in Rome last month. That could reduce African dependence on foreign assistance, and also reduce the environmental impact of the food itself.
Of course, the individual consumer can feel a little overwhelmed at having to sort through all the environmental implications while grocery shopping.
That’s why the Swedish government is trying to make it a little easier. As Elisabeth Rosenthal reported in The Times, a new food-labeling system aims to estimate the carbon impact of menu items in restaurants and food on grocery shelves, expressed in kilograms of carbon dioxide per kilogram of product. Pictures of individual farmers are also on the labels.
“We’re the first to do it, and it’s a new way of thinking for us,” Ulf Bohman of the Swedish National Food Administration said. “We’re used to thinking about safety and nutrition as one thing and environmental as another.”
If the system proves effective it could spread to other countries the same way that nutritional labeling has.
So it’s possible that in the near future, you’ll be able to make sure your vegetables really are green.
Environmentalists are taking a fresh look at food. Leda Meredith, a ‘‘locavore,’’ inspects a basil plant. / MARILYNN K. YEE/THE NEW YORK TIMES
