As they perfect these life-cycle assessments, scientists are ready to answer the question raised by a cartoon-book character in a Roy Lichtenstein-inspired poster outside the university cafe: "Is my cheeseburger causing global warming?"
Frequent-flier sushi
It was a sparkling spring day at the Getty Center in the Brentwood hills. Instead of heading into the sunshine for their lunch break, museum staffers filed into a darkened auditorium to hear a lecture: "Play With Your Food."
The crowd appeared to be a thoughtful bunch, many of them foodies, and more receptive than a famished football player to weighing the environmental and social consequences of their food choices.
Helene York took the stage with her PowerPoint slides, fulfilling the directive of Fedele Bauccio, Bon Appetit's blunt-talking chief executive: "Customers make choices for us. We need to educate them."
York, who directs the Low Carbon Diet initiative, explains that the diet is to slim down the company's greenhouse gas emissions by 25%, beginning by changing the 80 million meals it serves a year.
"That sounds like a lot," she said. Yet it's nothing compared with what can happen if Bon Appetit persuades its parent company, Compass Group, to follow suit, as it did with the switch to sustainably caught seafood. Compass Group is the largest food-service company in North America, with 8,000 accounts including sports arenas, hospitals and Chicago's public schools. Other food service companies, such as Sodexo (Marriott), are also considering menu changes.
To start, Bon Appetit has targeted those items with the biggest impact. That means reducing the amount of beef and cheese.
"Inherently, beef and lamb are worse than every other form of animal protein," York said. The reason? These ruminants incessantly belch methane gas. She points out that methane has 23 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide.
Vegetarians think they get a free ride, she said. Yet if they nibble on a grilled cheese sandwich, they buy into the same industrialized system, which is fertilizer-intensive. Overuse of fertilizer releases nitrous oxide into the atmosphere, a gas that has 296 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide.
"Does your sushi get more frequent-flier miles than you do?" another poster flashes on the screen. It draws a laugh from the audience -- until York explains that Bon Appetit is phasing out fresh seafood brought in by air freight.
