The more intensive and narrow the agricultural process, the more intensive the greenhouse gas emissions - which means your organic vegetables, wild-caught salmon, and free-range grass fed beef is a larger contributor to climate change than modern farming techniques.

And that means rich White people disproportionately affect the environment through their eating habits, according to a new report in the Journal of Industrial Ecology.

The report looks at what different demographic populations eat and was undertaken to get a better understanding of the environmental impacts of the food consumption patterns of major demographic groups.



Food production, distribution and waste contributes to climate change through the production of greenhouse gases. Obviously food that requires significantly more amounts of water and land, like organic crops when it comes to land or rice and almonds when it comes to regular food, are also causing more pollution, especially if they are in areas where foods are difficult to grow. A group of humanities scholars analyzed data from The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's What We Eat in America - Food Commodity Intake Database, which provides per capita food consumption estimates for more than 500 types of food as well as water. They also used the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which provides estimates of individual dietary intake.

Estimates of the environmental impact of these foods were obtained from various sources, an obvious confounder, since concepts like virtual water and virtual emissions have long been debunked. Foods considered 'environmentally intense,' include those that require more water, land and energy and produce more greenhouse gases than other foods.

Apples, potatoes, beef and milk are claimed to be the most environmentally intense foods

According to their analysis, the scholars found that White individuals produced an average of 680 kilograms of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide each year that can be directly linked to what they ate and drank, while Latino individuals produced 640 kilograms of carbon dioxide and blacks produced 600 kilograms of carbon dioxide each year.  Suspect estimates and only 20 lbs. difference may not be meaningful, unless it is a billion people, so the authors add in that the food habits of Whites require about 7 percent more water at 328,000 liters per year than Latino individuals, whose food habits require 307,000 liters per year of water.

Black's eating habits depend on about 12 percent more land than other populations

The authors say in one area Blacks are worse for the environment than Whites; land use. And that is because of higher consumption of chicken and apples, which are high land-use food items. 

Policies that attempt to reduce resource dependence or greenhouse gases need to also take into account individual nutrients, says Joe Bozeman, a student in the University of Illinois at Chicago Institute for Environmental Science and Policy and first author on the paper. "If you are going to draft policies that may reduce the amount of land-intensive oranges, we need to think about other less resource-intensive sources of vitamin C. It gets more complex as you look closely at the food pipeline and how different populations engage with it, but we are now starting to get a better understanding on these complex dynamics in such a way that we can begin to rationally take steps to improve environmental quality."

Citation: Joe F. Bozeman III, Rayne Bozeman, Thomas L. Theis, 'Overcoming climate change adaptation barriers: A study on food–energy–water impacts of the average American diet by demographic group', 25 March 2019, Journal of Industrial Ecology DOI:10.1111/jiec.12859