Why don't food labels include carbon footprint info?

[walkingthewalk]

We have loads and loads of nutritional info on food.

Why can't we have something that indicates the carbon impact of the food?

I read an article that said the average meal travels 1500 miles to get to your plate.

There must be a simple straight forward method of including some info about this on food packs?

I thought climate change was important so this could be an easy way for people to have a better understanding and make informed choices about what they buy.

I really doubt it’s an easy way. So if you have a packet of biscuits you have to calculate the carbon footprint of every individual ingredient, then design your packaging and pay to have it printed - then you are tied into a supplier regardless of what happens with the market because you have 20,000 packets that say your flour comes from X.

I agree with @luxxlisbon for packaged food. Fruit and veg already has its point of origin printed so you can easily work out from that pretty easily that asparagus flown in from Peru is not eco friendly …

Because by and large food manufacturers and our government don't give a shit about climate change?

I agree it would be a good idea though.

There is no way to do this. Your Biscuit factory in Spain exporting worldwide would have to figure out in advance which grocery shops are going to buy boxes and print a special label for every shop. Because that pack of biscuits being sold in a Spanish shop twenty miles down the road or Scottish shop is going to have a different carbon footprint. It’s actually easier to just use the origin labels and buy local as much as possible.

Too, even if they could put kg CO2 used to produce and ship the food, what would you do with the info? There’s no standard or guideline anyway.

Or is it that ideas like this are pie in the sky fantasies that cannot be executed in the real world?

Packaged food also has country of origin printed on it.

If Tesco buys frozen peas centrally and then they are shipped to the supermarket around the corner from the warehouse, and the supermarket in Shetland, the food miles will be massively different. They can't know in advance

Agree it does sound harder than I thought it would be.

I guess I just thought every ingredient in shown on packaging, some with the nutrient content, with how much of each ingredient is in it as well as the percentage of daily allowance and then the red green Amber thing on the front to show how good or bad for you it is.

I thought if they can do that then they would be able to do something for carbon. Even if it's just how many miles from the factory to the country of distribution.

Spain to England
Spain to Italy
Spain to xxx
Etc etc

No, this would be impossible. Every time the manufacturer has to use a different supplier for an ingredient, or they move factory sites etc, they would have to reprint all labels. It would cost a ridiculous amount of money in auditing and labelling, and that would only push prices up further. Just buy local, seasonal food if you're that bothered (but nobody really wants to restrict themselves to only that which is available locally, and without hothousing...)

No thank you let’s try not to suck all the joys of life away!

Carbon Footprint is only half the story. Food grown in its natural environment and shipped hundreds/thousands of miles can be more environmentally friendly than that grown elsewhere in 'false' hothousing environments. Shipped or flown or driven? You need to look at things like water consumption (cotton fir example needs a hell of a lot of water), pesticides used, deforestation for farming, lack of crop rotation for single product farming, etc etc.

Again, it’s countries of distribution and what would happen is they’d have to project
1m biscuits going to UK
2m biscuits stating in Spain
1 m biscuits going to Germany
3 m biscuits going to USA
et etc for HUNDREDS of countries.

Then what do you do when the orders from these countries change? (And they do change, projections are on average only correct 20% of the time) You can’t relabel your biscuits and you can’t ship them with the wrong label. So in the bin the food goes. And that would be even worse for the climate.

A good start would be fresh food/produce to be labelled with whether it's been air freighted or grown in a heated greenhouse.

Or rather a positive label for non air freight and non hothoused. Since they manage to label country of origin.

It's not obvious to everyone which produce is shipped (e.g. bananas) and which is flown.

I suppose it would be somewhat difficult to calculate unless it’s something like fruit. It would also be difficult because a lot of companies, although they probably wouldn’t want to admit it, have no idea where all their ingredients hails from. Remember the horse meat scandal??

It would be impractical, and the administrative cost would end up being passed on to consumers — making even basic foods even more expensive.

Environmental labelling is something that is being looked at by government. But it's difficult and complicated. It will take a few years to work out something that works and means somethig for the customer - and it likely would be voluntary not mandatory when introduced.

It took years for the front of pack nutritional labelling (red amber green) voluntary scheme to be agreed and implemented. And that's relatively easy - you can just test some samples of the final product to find out the nutritional data.

Wouldn’t looking at country of origin give you a good idea? You can see how far it’s come and take a guess at whether it needed heated greenhouses etc, based on time of year?

That’s my thought too. Informed consumers who care about the environment are going to be the type of people who can use country of origin and from there deduce how it was grown and freighted.

On greenhouses, 99% of them use passive solar heat so not sure why that is an issue for the climate.

Here's what the government said in answer to your question in March
questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-questions/detail/2022-03-01/132172

Agree about sucking the joy out if life. Not everyone cares about something you happen to. I buy local.food where I live because I am proud of the commitment to food security, if I want to buy an Arctic roll.which has flown thousands of miles, I don't need to have I preached to me.

Actually it is quite difficult to work out. I'm not a horticulturalist. Butternut squash for example. It's an autumn vegetable in the northern hemisphere. In the spring it comes from South America. Is that air freighted or shipped? It's impossible to find out.

They only need a stamp or symbol like the MSC for fish or the Red tractor, for sustainable growing/transport. It could even be the shelf label, supermarkets know exactly where their produce comes from and how.

I don't see the point. Whether you buy it or not, the item will have already gone on it's journey from wherever anyway.
At least with nutritional information, it only applies if you actually consume it.

If you want to compare 2 types of something and chose the one with the smallest footprint it would be useful

If you want to minimise your footprint

I'd like it for other stuff too - your fridge says it's in use footprint but nothing about its manufacture or percentage of material that can easily be reused

Of course it's possible, in terms of costs many companies already have to report their footprint so the data is available , and of course it's prone to manipulation so would need very strict standards

There are carbon footprint calculators for food. The calculations I've seen seem to point to the same thing...animal derived foods (meat, cheese) have the highest footprint, because of production inefficiency (the first stage is growing crops to feed the animals long before one gets to anything a human eats). Also because of refrigeration. Transport doesn't seem to be more than a tiny fraction. But maybe it would look different if the footprint was calculated by brand rather than by food type.

Mark ups for non luxury food are minimal. Tiny, really. Despite what you might read in the press, supermarkets and food distributors are on their knees. All time low profits outside of wartime.

They can't afford to have to do anything else!!!