Eating Sustainably: A proof of concept for evaluating the footprint of any recipe

Published a blog post with some friends at work on a proof of concept we put together to evaluate the carbon, land-use, and water-use footprint of recipes. We imagined a person walking through the aisle of a grocery store, about to make a decision on what to eat. Suddenly, they’re aware of the alternatives they have to make a direct and immediate impact on the planet.

Most carbon footprint calculators are kinda clunky, or they ask you to remember everything you ate this week. We flipped the idea around from past-oriented to future-oriented. What are you about to do? We also added land use and water use, which is obviously also very important. The demo should be available soon.

The crazy hard part is that recipes all write their ingredients differently, with more than just units being all over the place, but also with style pizazz like, “a sprig of thyme”. Eventually we’d like to capture all of this in our footprint model.

See article here: What is the carbon footprint of my recipe?