The Only Food Emissions Tracking App You Need — It’s Free!
Have I taken this title format a step too far? Are food emissions really as exciting as a free fitness app? Let’s find out…
As before, I’ll start with a TL;DR: I built a website last summer to help conveniently measure the environmental impact of your food. It’s free to use, open source, and privacy focused. Sounds good, right?
With this in mind, we’ll cover the Why, What, and How of this project. Stick around for an ✨ exciting announcement ✨ at the end and please feel free to star the repo on GitHub to show your support!
Why
Why does the world need this? …and why the heck did I spend my summer building this thing? Let me set the context.
In 2019, a paper published by the University of Oxford found that today’s food supply chains contribute towards 26% of total anthropogenic Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions [1, p. 1]. Of this, meat, aquaculture, eggs and dairy use ~83% of farmland and account for ~57% of Greenhouse Gas emissions, despite providing only 37% of our protein and 18% of our calories [1, p. 4]. They conclude that a transition towards plant-based diets could result in a land-use reduction of 76% and a 49% reduction in GHG emissions [1, p. 5]. So where…