Cultural context shapes the carbon footprints of recipes

TL;DR

This paper investigates how cultural culinary traditions influence the carbon footprints of recipes, highlighting the importance of cultural context in assessing and designing sustainable diets.

Contribution

It introduces a method to quantify recipe-level carbon footprints within cultural contexts, integrating food product data with recipe compositions to reveal cultural impacts on environmental sustainability.

Findings

Ingredient composition largely determines recipe carbon load

Cultural dietary practices significantly influence environmental impact

Nuanced understanding can guide sustainable recipe design

Abstract

Food systems are responsible for a third of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions central to global warming and climate change. Increasing awareness of the environmental impact of food-centric emissions has led to the carbon footprint quantification of food products. However, food consumption is dictated by traditional dishes, the cultural capsules that encode traditional protocols for culinary preparations. Carbon footprint estimation of recipes will provide actionable insights into the environmental sustainability of culturally influenced patterns in recipe compositions. By integrating the carbon footprint data of food products with a gold-standard repository of recipe compositions, we show that the ingredient constitution dictates the carbon load of recipes. Beyond the prevalent focus on individual food products, our analysis quantifies the carbon footprint of recipes within the cultural contexts that shape culinary protocols. While emphasizing the widely understood harms of animal-sourced ingredients, this article presents a nuanced perspective on the environmental impact of culturally influenced dietary practices. Along with the grasp of taste and nutrition correlates, such an understanding can help design palatable and environmentally sustainable recipes. Systematic compilation of fine-grained carbon footprint data is the way forward to address the challenge of sustainably feeding an anticipated population of 10 billion.