Encouraging Sustainable Diets
Three small changes in how we eat make the biggest difference.
One of the most difficult habits to change is what we eat. But if we’re serious about sustainability, encouraging sustainable diets is a challenge worth surmounting. In this action guide, we’ll explore practical steps to eating better for our planet—not just considering our own diets but also advocating for lasting systemic change.
Three simple, money-saving steps take us most of the way along the pathway to sustainable food: drink more water, eat more plants, and avoid beef (and other ruminant meat). We’ll briefly review why these three steps beyond the standard American diet provide such enormous environmental benefits; if you’d like to dig into more detail, see our “Sustainable Eating: The Big Three” action guide from May 2023.
Most people view their diet as a very personal choice, reflecting their heritage and culture. Food producers stand to gain or lose huge amounts of money depending on dietary decisions; the U.S. dairy industry calculates its impact totaled $752.93 billion in 2021. Encouraging our community to eat a sustainable diet can easily backfire due to the delicate dynamics of the discussion, so this action guide will also explore steps on the pathway to a sustainable community: effective ways to educate, demonstrate, participate, and advocate.
Help! I want to eat better for our planet, but I don’t know where to start.
Drink more water, eat more plants, and avoid beef. Drinking more water means drinking tap water, not bottled water. Most tap water in the United States is safe to drink directly, but you can filter it through an activated charcoal filter to improve taste. Even without a filter, just filling a pitcher and letting it sit overnight allows some chlorine to dissipate. The more plain tap water we drink, the fewer brewed or bottled beverages we can consume.
Eating more plants means reducing the consumption of meat and dairy. (If you’re already vegan, the advice to eat more plants doesn’t apply—you’re already doing great!) Eating at least thirty different vegetables and fruits each week is a fun challenge. Setting aside more room on our plates for plants leaves less room for animal products. The main reason that eating plants rather than animals is better for our planet is the efficiency of converting sunlight into food: if we eat plants directly rather than grow plants, feed them to animals, and then eat the animals, we can get four times as much food per acre of agricultural land.
Avoiding “beef” is shorthand for not eating beef, lamb, goat, and any other meat from a ruminant animal. (It’s just a lot easier and more understandable to say “avoid beef” rather than “avoid ruminant meat.”) Ruminants have four-compartment stomachs that ferment what they eat before digesting it. Many ruminants regurgitate cud from their foregut to chew over again. Careful studies of the environmental impacts of producing food show that raising ruminant animals has far worse environmental consequences than anything else. Just crossing off beef, lamb, and goat from our shopping list might be the simplest sustainability step with the biggest bang for the buck.
Help! My community’s climate action plan does not consider the carbon footprint of our food supply.
Many communities are developing climate action plans with two main goals in mind: first, to adapt to the consequences of global warming, and second, to mitigate the future scale of the problem by emitting less greenhouse gas pollution. Our carbon footprint is the amount of greenhouse gasses emitted as a result of our activities. The standard method for counting carbon considers three scopes: direct emissions from burning fuel (scope 1), indirect emissions from electricity (scope 2), and all other indirect emissions (scope 3).
Our diet is a major part of our carbon footprint, but we can’t measure its contribution as precisely as we can count our scope 1 and 2 emissions. This is one reason why climate action plans often include specific goals and strategies for communities to reduce scope 1 and 2 emissions, but provide only vague suggestions to reduce scope 3 emissions. Besides that, only 46% of Americans polled in 2023 said human activity is the primary why the Earth is warming, leaving a majority who believe that climate change can’t be stopped by reducing our carbon emissions.
Nonetheless, as environmental champions, we can influence the contents of our community’s climate action plan by educating ourselves about the connection between diet and carbon emissions, demonstrating how to shrink our personal carbon footprint, participating in the process of developing a climate action plan, and advocating for science-based strategies and goals that include understanding and reducing the environmental impact of the food our community eats. So, we should add our voices to the conversation as our communities create climate action plans, doing our best to present science-based facts our communities can trust while recognizing that some of what we say may be disregarded by those who think there is no reason to worry about our carbon footprints.
Help! If most people aren’t worried about their carbon footprint, what other reasons can I use to encourage them to eat better for our planet?
Although most Americans believe climate change is not primarily caused by human activity, a majority also say that we should protect our environment, even at the risk of curbing economic growth. We are more likely to find common ground if we frame conversations about food more broadly than the single issue of climate change.
Food conversations can come up in many contexts, from planning family meals to choosing a restaurant for a night out with friends to setting policy for school lunches. One persuasive argument for more sustainable food choices is economic: drinking more water, eating more plants, and avoiding beef saves money. If we can add saving our planet on top of that, we have a persuasive point.
Here are the key environmental benefits of the three first steps toward a sustainable food future.
Drinking more tap water:
Reduces plastic waste from bottles.
Saves energy.
Takes trucks off the road.
Eating more plants:
Reduces consumption of meat and dairy.
Feeds more people per acre of land and gallon of water.
Avoiding beef:
Feeds a lot more people per acre of land and gallon of water.
Reduces prophylactic use of antibiotics in animals.
If we educate ourselves about the environmental impacts of our food, demonstrate how to enjoy a more sustainable diet, and participate in community life, we can advocate more effectively for sustainability whenever the opportunity arises to have a meaningful conversation about what’s for dinner.
What’s Still Ahead on the Pathway…
Last year, we explored the pathway to sustainable movement, energy, and goods. Now, we’re exploring the pathway to sustainable food to transition from the standard American diet to a healthier plant-centered diet and from industrial to regenerative agriculture. Stay with us on the journey to sustainability as we take action to have a positive impact on the world.
References and Further Reading
The Standard American Diet: What is it and Where do we go Next?, DoctorKiltz
Sustainable Eating: The Big Three, Fred Horch
U.S. Dairy Industry’s Economic Impact Totals $753 Billion, International Dairy Foods Association
Chlorine Confusion, Washington Post
If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares, Our World in Data
Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers, Science
Environmental Impacts of Food Production, Our World in Data
Calculation Tools, Greenhouse Gas Protocol
Why Some Americans Do Not See Urgency on Climate Change, Pew Research Center
Environment, Gallop