When too much information kills information
Hello! My name is Eden and I am an intern here at Jellyfish. My internship started at the end of last may and since then I have been helping Jellyfish choose a methodology for calculating carbon emissions from food as well as developing a database for all of the food and their emissions.
I have considered myself an environmentalist since high school and now I am currently majoring in Environmental Analysis and Policy at my school. I am a big believer that individual actions can create a giant impact and that one of the biggest obstacles to creating a more sustainable future is the lack of easy and accessible knowledge. That is why when I came across Jellyfish, and saw their mission to give people just that, I wanted to join!
The most shocking thing I have learned from my internship so far is how much a measurement of Carbon Dioxide emissions can vary just depending on how it is calculated. There are so many things you can include when trying to determine a food's carbon impact. For example, you could include feed (for livestock), emissions from farming, from processing, from transportation and the list just goes on and on. In Poore and Nemecek (2018) [1], their calculation of beef was emissions of 7050 grams of Carbon Dioxide per 100 grams of produce while another calculation (Clune et al. 2017) [2] only had 2873 for beef. To me that difference was amazing and it made me wonder which numbers are the “best.”
Curious as to why there was such a great difference, I did more digging. For example, the Poore and Nemecek paper is way more comprehensive than Clune 2017 and includes land use change. Furthermore, Poore and Nemecek takes into account the efficiency of food systems around the world by giving more weight to areas with less efficient systems. Not only are there different ways to measure emissions, but different places have different means of production, which also affects emissions.
I think that the great differences in numbers can cause a lot of confusion, especially if someone is not familiar with calculating emissions, since having a lot of numbers floating around can make it seem like we aren’t actually sure how much carbon emissions there are or that some of them are wrong. But that is not the case! All these numbers are right, the tricky part is just knowing what they represent!
[1] J. Poore, & T. Nemecek. (2018). “Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers”. Science Magazine.
[2] S. Clune, E. Crossin, & K. Verghese. (2017) “Systematic review of greenhouse gas emissions for different fresh food categories”. Journal of Cleaner Production.