Giving Nature Guide – Giving Nature

The basic idea of the Giving Nature Guide doesn’t just have to do with the environmental impact of your food choices. While we do not make diet recommendations for weight watching or specific diet goals, we do recommend you take both the environment and your own health into consideration when choosing food and always be mindful of nutritional concerns.

If you think a specific diet regimen works best for you or you or you practice one already and want to know if it fits into a PATHS Journey, we recommend exploring plant based diets.

It’s important to remember that Practicing Awareness Towards Human Sustainability is what makes the guide most effective along with a lot of common sense, so be sure to use them all. To help with those choices we have compiled a list of recommended foods. Click here to view them.

Also, being informed with good research when looking at comparative studies or food recommendations is critical to making good food choices.

We have taken care to back up all Giving Nature Food recommendations and commentary with solid research from the most reputable studies world wide, such as the excellent link located at the bottom of this page that will take you to Oxford University’s 2020 comprehensive comparative food study. Along with that backup we attempt to guide you through such data to help inform your food choices.

The Oxford study lists four categories that they have found to be critical in determining the environmental impact of any given food.

They are:

Land Use

Green House Gas

Freshwater Use

Water Pollution (Eutrophication)

To illustrate what we mean by guiding you towards informed food choices let’s look at where cows milk ranks on the Oxford’s chart compared to eggs. You first may note that milk fares a little better than eggs on the Oxford GHG chart. The problem is that dairy farmers don’t just produce milk for beverage sales.

There’s no way to tell if the milk you drink has come from cows dedicated to just that purpose. In fact, its a near certainty it wasn’t. Its been used to make other further processed products too

For example, if you look at cheese on the Oxford chart you’ll see that it’s ranked much higher for GHG emissions when compared to eggs. That’s because it takes 4 times the milk to produce cheese than if you drank it as a beverage. So that means four times the cows, eating four times the grain and making four times the Green House Gas than for a glass of milk.

Oxford’s study also demonstrates that its not just GHG’s we should be considering when purchasing foods.

The true comparison is to use the Beef Dairy Herd ranking numbers when making comparison to other foods listed on the chart. It truly represents the impact of dairy because it goes back to the source, the cow itself, for all dairy products produced from milk to cheese.

The calculations below make comparisons based on those parameters using the data from Oxford Studies Four Critical research categories with some having subsets. Higher numbers indicate greater negative impact on the environment. Lower numbers indicate lesser ones.

Land Use

Land in its natural state is a Carbon Sink. When it is repurposed for agriculture the worse it is for our climate. So how much is used to produce a particular food goes into determining whether or not it can be part of a PATHS journey.

Land Use Measured in square meters (m2) of land that are needed to produce food

Per Kilogram of food

Beef Dairy Herd. 43.24m2

Eggs. 6.27 m2

Per 1000 Kilocalories

Beef Dairy Herd. 15.84 m2

Eggs. 4.35 m2

Per 100 grams of protein

Beef Dairy Herd. 21.9 m2

Eggs. 5.7 m2

Green House Gas (ghg)

We’ve written a lot about Green House Gases already. The main thing to remember in these comparisons is Methane emissions from ruminants. Go to our page on Green House Gases here.

Beef Dairy Herd. 21.00 (ghg)

Eggs. 4.5 (ghg)

(Subset) Carbon Footprint

Per 100 grams protein (g)

Beef Dairy Herd. 16.87g

Eggs. 4.21g

Per 1000 Kilocalories(kcal)

Beef Dairy Herd. 12.2 kcal

Eggs 3.24 kcal

Freshwater

Fresh water is becoming more and more scarce. We are consuming much of it through Agriculture. Water right claims between farmers and residents in any given area across the world are becoming more frequent and sometimes escalate towards violence. We can’t live without water and we cant live with out food. We need to balance both in a Human Sustaining way. Food choices that keep this balance in mind are those you want to make as you embark on your PATHS journey.

Use in Liters (L)

Per kilogram of food

Beef Dairy Herd. 2,714 L

Eggs. 628 L

Per gram of protein

Beef Dairy Herd. 1,375 L

Eggs. 521 L

Per 1000 kilocalories

Beef Dairy Herd. 994 L

Eggs 401 L

Water Pollution (Eutrophication in technical terms)

Awareness about Water pollution from agriculture has steadily built over the last 50 years regarding pesticides and herbicides that runoff of agricultural lands during heavy rains into our streams rivers and ocean, making too much water deadly for humans and other living things.

But until recently we pretty much ignored the nitrate and phosphorus in fertilizers made from animal waste that were running off in the same fashion. Ignorance has not been bliss in this instance. We now know that such runoff is causing mass die offs of all sorts of Ocean life by overfeeding algae that creates Dead Zones where only it can live and nothing else. This can effect the oceans Carbon Sink action and reduce food sources for millions of people world wide. Reducing the amount of land used for growing crops greatly increases Human Sustainability. The less land thats fertilized the better.

Measurements are done in kilograms (kg) of Phosphate nutrient pollution from fertilizer runoff.

Per kilogram of food

Beef Dairy Herd. 365.29kg

Eggs 21.76 kg

Per 100grams of protein produced

Beef Dairy Herd. 185.1 kg

Eggs. 19.6 kg.

Per 1000 kilocalories

Beef Dairy Herd. 133.9kg

Eggs. 15.1kg

This is just one comparative matchup. We encourage you do one yourself comparing chicken meat to Beef using the Oxford chart. You’ll find similarly stunning result.

The main thing to keep in mind is that Farm Animals create 18% of all Green House Gases in the Earth’s atmosphere and are a primary source of fresh and sea water nutrient pollution. Among farm animals, Ruminants, are by far the worse offenders. They are the greatest GHG contributors due to the emissions occurring as a by product of their digestive function called Enteric Fermentation…Non-Ruminant animal derived food choices are better…choosing chicken and eggs are more sustainable if you still want animal derived foods proteins and nutrients in your diet along with increasing the eating of vegetables and whole grains.

Another note.

This comparison in regards to eggs relates to whole eggs straight from the hen that laid it. Further processed egg products like liquid egg whites or those with dried whole egg, egg yolk or egg whites as an ingredient in them are not included in the rankings.

Ok, so that’s a lot of wonky data if you’re not into that sort of thing but we just wanted you to know that we take the responsibility of our recommendations seriously and want you to feel confident about them.

We’re also not suggesting that a our guide requires you eat more eggs or chicken meat as a substitute for reducing ruminant foods from your diet. We’re just trying to build awareness of the environmental impacts your food choices have on the world you depend upon for living. If you can’t give up eating animal derived foods altogether because it’s to abrupt or for nutritional concerns, then yes, by all means choose a dish that includes poultry meat or eggs instead of beef.

It’s true for for everyone, including the people at Giving Nature, that awareness takes practice. We can support each other’s efforts on our PATHS to a better future by interacting.

We’ll be posting daily meal plan suggestions on our social media page.

The Oxford study and other well credentialed studies like it will be used as reference for creating the posts.

So please follows us. We hope you give feedback and ask plenty of questions. We’ll do our best to respond in a timely manner. And don’t forget to look at our list of PATHS Recommended Products to help you own your PATHS journey

https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/eutrophying-emissions-kcal

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/30/dining/climate-change-food-eating-habits.html

Click the button below to learn about Practicing Awareness Towards Human Sustainability,