by Laurie Frick

Supported by

25% of global emissions come from food.

25% of global emissions is due to food production. This surprises everyone I’ve talked with since starting this project. The carbon footprint of what we eat surpasses transportation (19%) and shelter (17%).

“ART TRANSFORMS DATA”

We know calorie counts, which foods are high carb, even gluten free… but we really don’t have a clue about the carbon footprint for individual foods. Can art be the way to expose the huge disparity between foods?

Based on US, UK and France data*

Very little work has been done with individual diets and so I was delighted to find Diego Rose and Martin Heller, researchers at Tulane University and University of Michigan who have spent the past several years linking carbon footprint of actual foods consumed with USDA food categories in the “What We Eat In America” food survey, and gave me access to their US data prior to publication. Thank you. Also to open data from Individual and National Study on Food consumption for France and the Ademe Resource Center for Greenhouse gas accounting. And to UK Data Service who granted access to the National Diet and Nutrition Survey, along with the research paper from Peter Scarborough, etal, University of Oxford.

*Data Source from USDA, UK Data Centre, Datagouv.fr

The data collected from the three countries had only male and female as gender options. We hope that they will add further gender options for participants in upcoming surveys.

“What We Eat” was created by data artist, Laurie Frick in Austin, Texas and Ashin Mandal, Benjamin Brachert, Florian Dusch and Siniz Kim of zigzag, a multidisciplinary design company in Stuttgart, Germany.

Laurie Frick

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