Through You, Through Food 1 Through You, Through Food Sarah Callahan, Wei Kie Fong, Kathleen Hendricks, Elizabeth Jalone, Justin Mackiewicz, Faculty Advisor: Dr. Eugene Cordero UNVS 196D: Climate Solutions Initiative San Jose State University December 2, 2008Through You, Through Food 2 Executive Summary It has been estimated that the production and transport of food is responsible for between 25-35% of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. A campaign to reduce the food-related carbon emissions at SJSU included two parts: 1) an analysis of the carbon footprint of a typical SJSU student and 2) a social marketing campaign designed to educate SJSU students about the connections between food and global warming. Our analysis reveals that each SJSU student is responsible for 16,000 lb of CO2 emissions annually and that 28 percent of that is due to food consumption. If each SJSU student were to reduce their food-related emissions by only 25%, the overall campus impact would be a nearly 36 million pound reduction in emissions, the equivalent of taking 4400 cars off the road. With nearly a third of each student’s carbon emissions coming from their diet, we launched a pilot social marketing campaign Through you, through food to educate SJSU students about climate-friendly food choices. Initial surveys of 150 students at the dining commons found that very few students realized the connection between the food they eat and global warming. Then, a continuous three-week long social marketing campaign was run using various methods including print media (e.g. posters, flyers, and postcards) and face to face interactions (e.g. a tabling event at the student union and personal discussions in the dining commons). A final survey at the dining commons showed that our social marketing campaign changed student understanding of the connection between food and global warming. This suggests that a sustained campaign to educate the SJSU community about these connections, together with a university commitment to offer more climate friendly food choices, could significantly reduce campus-related emissions. The added value of this approach is that changes to our food consumption are simple, cost effective and achievable ways to reduce emissions, with an additional health benefit that comes from eating more plant based and environmentally sustainable foods.Through You, Through Food 3 Global Warming and Food Choices Although couched in terms of probability rather than certainty, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has concluded that the symptoms of climate change, specifically global warming, are results of human activity as opposed to normal global temperature fluctuations (Union of Concerned Scientists [UCS], 2007). They arrived at this conclusion through the collection of historical data and extrapolation using computer simulations. Additionally, because they have compiled, analyzed, and interpreted the findings of other climate experts, this organization has become the most comprehensive authority on climate change on the planet. All this work has been done to prove one simple truth: it is the sum of many different human behaviors that has a deleterious effect on the global environment. Everything, from the time we wake in the morning to the time we sleep, affects the global climate. Sometimes we make conscious decisions that we know have effects on the climate, such as driving a low carbon emissions vehicle or recycling. However, sometimes the choice is hidden from us in the most innocuous of places. Heeter (2006) illustrated this idea by quantifying the cost of a healthy bowl of morning oatmeal in terms of the usage of fossil fuels used to transport it from its farm of origin to the breakfast table. The usage of fossil fuels by humans is one activity that generates excessive greenhouse gasses, mainly carbon dioxide and methane. The extent to which any human activity generates carbon emissions is commonly referred to as a “carbon footprint.” In fact, of the various human activities that affect climate change, the level of emissions is the most important variable that will determine which of many possible scenarios modeled by the IPCCThrough You, Through Food 4 will end up happening. In other words, the degree to which the climate might change through the end of the century will depend strongly on the level of emissions. (UCS, 2007) Pollan (2008) linked the food industry in the United States, and therefore the very necessary human activity of eating, to carbon emissions. “After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy — 19 percent. And while the experts disagree about the exact amount, the way we feed ourselves contributes more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than anything else we do — as much as 37 percent, according to one study. Whenever farmers clear land for crops and till the soil, large quantities of carbon are released into the air. But the 20th-century industrialization of agriculture has increased the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the food system by an order of magnitude; chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food. Put another way, when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases (para. 3).” The size of one’s food carbon footprint is the sum of all the carbon-generating activities that go into putting food on the table. Carbon emissions are generated by the growing, processing, and transportation of the food we eat. However, what we eat and when we eat can play an even larger part in the size of our “foodprint.” When considering “what we eat,” we can negatively impact our “foodprint” by selecting items such as beef and internationally grown produce. Compared to other, smaller animals suchThrough You, Through Food 5 as chicken, beef requires more resources to produce, such as food, water, land, and fertilizer. According to Pimentel & Pimentel (2007), it takes 55 calories of energy (input) to create 1 calorie of beef in comparison to chicken,