Good Food’s May issue features recipes with carbon calories – helping guide sustainable eating choices 

Wednesday 1 May, 2024

Good Food, the UK’s number one food media brand, publishes a collection of recipes with carbon calories calculated.

Carbon calories are based on the carbon footprint of food, factoring in the life cycle of food production from farm to fork and onwards to disposal.

The Good Food May issue out now features, for the first time, recipes with carbon calories listed alongside the more common nutritional data such as fat, salt and protein. The Good Food recipes’ carbon calories have been calculated using the Reewild tracking app to help make understanding the carbon footprint of food easier.

“Good Food has been running features on sustainability for many years and we’ve consulted lots of experts on the subject. As a trusted brand for over 35 years, we check and recheck our information. The concept of carbon calories might be new to most people but it’s a simple way to raise awareness about how what we put on our plates impacts the planet.

“We’ve included in this month’s Good Food magazine three carbon-assessed recipes and there are 25 on our Good Food website. We’ve used the free app Reewild to calculate carbon calories as it offers a way to understand the carbon footprint of food, which can help everyone make conscious choices about the impact of what we eat.”

Lulu Grimes, Managing Editor of Good Food

Freddie Lintell, Founder/CEO of Reewild said: “We’re delighted to be introducing the concept of carbon calories alongside Good Food. Carbon calories help to simplify a complex science, enabling consumers to better understand the environmental impact of their food choices.”

Reewild use a mixture of open-source databases from investigations that have conducted Life Cycle Assessments of different food products and ingredients. This gives each ingredient a carbon footprint value measured in CO2e, with 1CC equating to 1g of CO2e emitted by the product. Recipes are a combination of different ingredients of different weights. For the Good Food recipes, these carbon footprint values are more generalised, using average UK data, as we do not know the ingredient sourcing for each individual who makes the recipe. The carbon footprint values of the weighted ingredients are aggregated together.

The following information is included on the goodfood.com website:
Disclaimer: The carbon footprint scores provided for recipes use open-source data from Agribalyse and Poore and Nemecek (2018), the latter being the largest meta-analysis of food systems to date. These scores are for information purposes only. Readers should be aware of potential inaccuracies due to data limitations and variations in food systems. These carbon scores should be used cautiously, as individual factors may not be fully accounted for, and different branded products may produce differing emissions.