food labels: environmental impact

Food labeling has increased in complexity as the nature of the ingredients has become more difficult to understand, and many people fear that we are losing control over what we are ingesting. When we could no longer pronounce the names of ingredients, we started insisting that all ingredients should be labeled; when we realized that some food can make us fat, we asked for calorie and protein content; when cereals stopped including anything nutritious, we needed to see added vitamins and minerals; when we were told that some fat was good and some was bad, we asked for labelling of transfats; when we found that a lot of our staples were genetically modified, we wanted to know which ones; as we became more aware of allergies, we asked for labeling of known allergens.

These things are all relatively easy to identify and label - although there is plenty of resistance in some quarters - but when it comes to environmental impact, a minefield has opened up as supermarkets start labeling the carbon impact of foods. If the carbon footprint of a grocery item could be definitively quantified as a broad indicator of potential environmental damage (mainly from energy consumed in its production and transportation) then it would help improve consumers' ability to manage their own carbon footprints. Increased awareness should help weed out high-carbon products and encourage consumption of locally produced goods. I'm just not sure how carbon footprints will be standardised in a way that fairly compares different goods from different countries, and is clear enough for the average consumer to understand.

But it gets even more complicated. Carbon is not the only measure of environmental impact. Another hidden impact is the embodied water in foods. Water is exported and imported in the sense that food grown in one country requires water for its growth, so the producing country is selling virtual water to the importing country. One of the big problems with this is that many food producing countries don't have water to spare, and many food importing countries are saving their own water at the expense of others.

Wikipeida goes into more detail on the impacts of embodied water, particularly as related to global trade, noting also that this issue doesn't apply only to food. Those jeans you're wearing represent 10,850 litres of embodied water. Waterwise estimates that of all the water used by the average Briton, 65% is embedded in food, 30% in industrial goods. Out of 3400 litres used by each person every day, only 150 comes from the tap.

I am in favour of finding some way of identifying the impacts of the way food and other goods are produced and transported, but it's going to take some time to figure out how. Embodied water and carbon are the two most all-encompassing measures of environmental impact, but there are others. And what about labour practices and other social impacts? The list goes on.