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Gathering data to measuring your grocery shopping environmental impact

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Gentry Demchak

Aug 10, 2019
10:41

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 I want to help change people's shopping and dietary behaviors away from the standard american meat-based diet and towards a vegan diet. I think changing our diets is the simplest solution to our global warming issues. In order to change habits, you have to measure! So I'm doing research for a project that will measure the environmental impact of the food you buy so people can clearly see - rather than guess - how they are contributing to climate change.

I'm running into challenges collecting data, however, as products can be made up of many different ingredients and the source of each of those ingredient is not usually available.

What resources can I use to collect data on food production? Should I just contact every single farm asking about their environmental impact? That could take the rest of my life. There are millions of farms! On top of that, i would also need to contact every single company making food and ask them to provide info about who they source their ingredients from, many of which i doubt will be so happy to freely give me that info! This seems like an enormous amount of work to collect this data. any suggestions on how I should go about gathering all of this?