I found it relatively easy to know what food was healthiest by following Dr. Greger's cornerstone book "How Not to Die" and his online site nutritionfacts.org." Evaluating a food's overall sustainability was a bit more challenging.

Until I found Our World in Data.

(By the way, here's a fun "foodprint" calculator from the BBC to see how your food choices affect global warming.)

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Our World in Data provides numerous charts on various foods' carbon footprints, land, water and eutrophying effects, such as the following:

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The question often comes up: what about organic, pastured beef?

I'm all for sustainable plant agriculture.

But sustainable animal agriculture hasn't cut the mustard.

Three big things:

ONE- relates to the general concept of sustainability:

Imagine your friend had a loaf of bread. Then they took out 1/2 of 1 piece and threw the rest away. You'd think they were delusional, at best! And yet, this is what we do every time we eat a hamburger!

"There's something called calorie efficiency that tells us what percentage of the calories we feed an animal is converted into edible products for humans. For beef is just 3%. That means for every hundred calories we feed a cow, we get just 3 cal of meat back in return. 97 cal are effectively wasted. For lamb it's about 4%. Pork 10%, chicken even for the most efficient of animals the vast majority more than 80% of calories are wasted. But what about protein. Pork and beef more than 90% of the protein they eat from animal feed is lost. Put 100 g of protein in and you get just 10 g back. Chicken is better, but we still only get 20% of the protein back in the form of meat."

That concept from Hannah Ritchie's new book, "Not the End of the World," really struck me! It's the best, most pragmatic book I have yet to read on the impactful steps we can each take to reduce climate change and our environmental impacts on the planet.

She goes on:

"We produce 5000 to 6000 cal per person per day, more than double what we need, yet still struggle to feed everyone. The reason is that we feed livestock and cars, not people. The world produces 3 billion tons of cereals every year. Less than half of this goes towards human food: 41% is fed to livestock and 11% is used for industrial uses, like biofuels. Poor countries use nearly all of their cereals for human food."

TWO-

Organic beef create more methane than conventionally raised cattle. Organic livestock are not fed imported fodder and are often grass-fed, but this means they produce less meat and grow more slowly, therefore spending longer emitting greenhouse gases before slaughter. If they are pastured, they also exercise and take longer to reach that finishing weight (quite an appropriate description of their impending demise).

THREE

It’s estimated that pasture raised beef require 2 1/2 times the amount of land as that raised in a CAFO (concentrated feeding operation). And though in some cases it may be thought of as land that is not suitable for other uses, any change to flora and fauna brings about its own losses of biodiversity and possibly carbon capture. And it is felt most of the increased cattle will not be appropriated to otherwise unused grasslands, but land where other vegetation and forests could provide more carbon capture. For a more complete discussion, check out this article by George Monbiot, author of Regenesis.

This myth of sustainably raised cattle is also promoted by the beef industry as seen in this article Hot air: five climate myths pushed by the US beef industry.

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Seafood has had ratings through sites such as these.

• Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch: This guide has a mobile app, helpful when shopping, and probably the best.
• Ocean Wise
• EDF Seafood Selector
• WWF Seafood Guides: WWF has multiple guides that are specific to different regions.

So , mussels, sardines,  and crabs can be chosen in good conscience. But salmon is for the most part off the list unless you buy wild caught Pacific (and even then, turns out products are often mislabeled).

The recent book "Salmon Wars: The Dark Underbelly of our Favorite Fish" was a real eye-opener. "A Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent and a former private investigator dive deep into the murky waters of the international salmon farming industry, exposing the unappetizing truth about a fish that is not as good for you as you have been told. A decade ago, farmed Atlantic salmon replaced tuna as the most popular fish on North America’s dinner tables. We are told salmon is healthy and environmentally friendly. The reality is disturbingly different. In Salmon Wars, investigative journalists Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins bring readers to massive ocean feedlots where millions of salmon are crammed into parasite-plagued cages and fed a chemical-laced diet. The authors reveal the conditions inside hatcheries, where young salmon are treated like garbage, and at the farms that threaten our fragile coasts." Google Books

According to this article from the NYTimes, $, salmon is the second most popular seafood in the US, but only 10-20% is wild Pacific salmon from well-managed fisheries in Alaska. The rest is imported farmed fish raised in open net pens in the ocean that have "severe crowding that pollutes the surrounding ecosystem with excrement and other effluvia, and promotes the spread of diseases and pests like sea lice, resulting in the need for antibiotics and pesticides." Interestingly, I found out from this article that I live 15 minutes away from an indoor salmon farm where freshwater recirculates and the fish are "carefully tended" to. The waste can be used as fertilizer. It's felt to possibly be an alternative- "That LocalCoho is able to raise these complex creatures on land is a radical change, one poised to turn an industry rife with environmental concerns on its head".

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