Arts in the Age of Data: How Environmentally Friendly is your Diet?

If we want to challenge and disrupt long-held assumptions about the world around us, we increasingly need to tell our stories through data and reveal the limits of other people’s numbers. In our second year, Bristol Liberal Arts students take the Arts in the Age of Data unit, which empowers us to become critical citizens in this digital age. During the unit, we work in teams to apply quantitative research methods to topics that matter to us. Below Charlotte Povey, Grace Harvey, Lucy McNeil, and Melissa Burke present their infographic based on their data project on environmentally friendly diets.

The climate crisis and the devastating effects of climate change create an issue that we, and many generations to come, will need to understand in order to bring about changes. In our early research stages, we found that if the current trend of a diet high in meat continues to rise, it is predicted that by 2050, the food system would become a major contributor to climate change, following an estimated 80% increase in global GHG emissions from food production and land clearing. Therefore, we decided to investigate the issues associated with climate change through the angle of food and everyday consumption - something which we, as individuals, can directly affect and change.

 Our findings showed that omnivores had the highest negative impact overall, and that meat and dairy products were some of the largest contributors to global warming. Furthermore, we found that, whilst veganism and vegetarianism are diets which have a lower environmental impact on average, some individuals following those diets had higher carbon footprint than omnivores. Our study also revealed that some plant-based products were anomalously high in emissions, such as dark chocolate and coffee. Our research demonstrated the importance of making dietary swaps as opposed to following blanket diet rules. In particular, reducing red meat or swapping a portion of meat to a plant-based alternative 1-2 times week, could help reduce an individual’s carbon footprint by two-thirds.

Our research ultimately verifies that making easy food swaps is an impactful and successful way to tackle climate change.