Food is complicated, not intractable.

We aim to be entirely transparent about our approach, and encourage constructive criticism.

Our database is open-sourced and availble on GitHub. We welcome pull requests.

Modern grocery stores typically carry upwards of 40,000 different items, produced by millions of farms and food companies from all around the world. Assessing every combination of every food item from every combination of its origins is de facto impossible. Fortunately, for our purposes, there are two simplifying factors:

First, almost all of those products are combinations of a smaller set of basic ingredients. As such, a not-particularly-huge database of base ingredients, combined with recipe information, enables us to cover the vast majority of all foods. Per that earlier link, as recently as the 1990s there were closer to 7,000 items in an entire grocery store. Those other 33,000 items are almost entirely new combinations, not the result of new basic ingredients.
Second, climate impact between different basic foods varies enormously, both because of the per-gram impact of each item and the quantities in which they are consumed. This reduces the number of foods that require focus.

These realities enable us to provide meaningful estimates of GHG Impact across the bulk of human food consumption.

Sources

We endeavour to rely exclusively on top-tier, peer-reviewed, published research articles, and international and national databases.

Global GHG Emissions
1. IEA (2019), Global Energy & CO2 Status Report 2019 (global, regional CO₂ emissions)
2. IPCC (2014), AR5 Synthesis Report: Climate Change 2014 (GHG breakdown)
3. The World Bank (2018), World Bank Open Data (total global population)
Food GHG Impact
- FAO (2019), Quantifying and mitigating greenhouse gas emissions from global aquaculture (farmed bivalve GHG impacts)
- Robert W. R. Parker, et al (Nature Climate Change, 2018), Fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions of world fisheries (fisheries GHG impacts)
- J. Poore, T. Nemecek (Science, 2018), Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers (food GHG share, food GHG impacts)
- Robinson, B., Winans, K., Kendall, A. et al. (The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment, 2018), A life cycle assessment of Agaricus bisporus mushroom production in the USA (mushroom GHG impacts)
Food Data
- Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) (2012), FAO/INFOODS Density Database - Version 2 (food density)
- FAO (1989), Yield and nutritional value of the commercially more important fish species (seafood yield)
- USDA (2019), FoodData Central (food values)
Gas & Driving
1. EPA (2018), Automotive Trends Report (average mileage)
2. DOE, EPA, www.fueleconomy.gov (CO₂ per unit of gas)

It is worth noting that both Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers and the AR5 Synthesis Report: Climate Change 2014 represent syntheses of thousands of individual, peer-reviewed studies.

Updates and Improvements

We update our database as soon as we become aware of more recent or comprehensive data. We also work to continually improve the database's ability to match the myriad of different names for basic ingredients and variations to the database foods that best reflect them, and to explicitly label items for which no meaningful data has been found. We currently catalog 1,368 different food names (as of November, 2021).

Please get in touch if you:

Know of sources that might be useful in addressing gaps in our coverage or improving existing estimates;
Want to help improve our catalog of ingredient names;
Find errors in our work;
Are a developer who wants to work on the project;
...or otherwise can be helpful

We'd love to hear from you 🙌