LCA Food 2012 in Saint Malo, France! - Manifestations et colloques ...

GROUP 5, SESSION B: FOOD PRODUCTS 8 th Int. Conference on LCA in the
Agri-Food Sector, 1-4 Oct 2012
133. Can you afford to make an eco-diet?
Sirpa Kurppa * , Kirsi Silvennoinen
MTT Biotechnology and Food Research, Team of Sustainable Bioeconomy FIN-31600 Jokioinen, Finland,
Corresponding author. E-mail: sirpa.kurppa@mtt.fi
The EU Commission has set the agricultural sector a recommended target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions
by 50% by 2050, which would require a 35% reduction by 2030. Our aim was describe some possible
changes in the Finnish diet that can help cut the emissions, while at same time benefitting public health, by
e.g. preventing heart diseasesand overweight. Meanwhile, big changes in food patterns are usually difficult
to achieve, we created several small adjustments all through the diet, keeping all the time the nutritional recommendations
in mind. We assumed that this approach would be much more successful than recommending
for example a vegan/vegetarian diet for everyone.
Our Eco-Diet’s main aim is to decrease the environmental impacts of food chain, while it simultaneously
encourages healthy eating patterns, is more economical to the consumer, and improves animal welfare.
In Eco-Diet, we propose that meals in general contain less meat and more vegetables, and we prefer seasonal
products. Our Eco-Diet is a model that is easy to adapt to everyday life by everybody, without requiring any
specific knowledge or education, or particular motivation for shifting towards vegan/vegetarian diet. Both of
our benchmarked diets, the eco-diet and conventional diet used as a reference include meat, fish and dairy
products.
We termed our conventional diet Basic Diet, and it was composed based on average Finnish diet with average
amount of calories. The other one we termed Eco-Diet, which took into consideration climate change,
water eutrophication, nutrition recommendations including appropriate amount of calories, and food waste.
Both diets covered a full week of five working days and two days of weekend; each day having three meals:
breakfast, lunch and dinner. Breakfast consisted of juice, bread or porridge, vegetable oil margarine, and
some vegetables or fruit. Lunch and dinner consisted of meat, fish or bean main course and a side dish such
as potatoes or rice. In addition, lunch and dinner included also a salad, bread, spread and drink.
The Eco-Diet included various kinds of meals; home cooked meals, convenience food and meals cooked in
school canteens in communal food services. In our model we used school meals for lunch, home cooked
meal or convenience food for dinner, and a home cooked breakfast. Here school meals were seen as an
equivalent to office lunch. For the weekends, lunch and dinner were home cooked or convenience food
meals, and breakfast was made at home.
We demonstrated that by following Eco-Diet for one week there was ca 40% decrease in carbon footprint,
while the impact on water eutrophication was even more significant. Differences in environmental impacts
between single food plate portions are remarkable: the highest animal based portions can have 5 times the
environmental impact when compared to the lowest vegetarian/vegan portion. In Eco-Diet we managed cut
off the highest impacts of the single food plates to such an extent that the difference between lowest and the
highest impacts was only about three times, in both carbon footprint and water eutrophication.
We compared the cost of the Eco-Diet to the conventional diet, and found that for a consumer economy the
Eco-Diet is a feasible, money saving alternative. Thus, we could oppose the preconception and correct the
thinking that environmental enhancive diet would be more expensive and as such regarded as a premium
diet. At the same time with saving the environment we can also save our money.
In Finland households are wasting about 5% of all purchased food 8 . Production of food that is lost in the
food supply chain causes remarkable, unnecessary environmental and economic impacts. We assumed that
Eco-Diet does not waste any food.
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