Meat Distribution Part 3: A Meat Buying App?

Agriculture, Data, Distribution & Supply Chain, Infographics, Meat, Technologists — By on August 29, 2011 11:33 am

[Editors Note: This is the third story in a series about meat distribution. Food + Tech Connect will run these stories every Monday for the next several weeks.]

In mid July, the Environmental Working Group (EWG) released a report entitled The Meat Eaters Guide, full of data and useful visualizations on the environmental impact of 20 “popular” protein sources.

EWG's useful Eat Smart graphic compares the environmental footprint of 20 common foods in the U.S.

But Lisa Frack, Social Media Manager at EWG sees ways that data can now be reconfigured and recombined with other information to create a useful new app.

The EWG guide assesses the lifecycle of meat, fish, dairy and vegetable protein, and includes easy to grasp charts like The Meat Lifecycle: From Cradle to Grave and Eat Smart which visualizes the greenhouse gas emissions of the 20 food items.

The study confirmed information most of us already know about meat, namely that it is far harsher on the environment than its protein-filled vegetable cousins.  But some surprises also surfaced in the report: cheese impacts the environment more than chicken or pork, and transportation accounts for just a tiny fraction of these food’s carbon footprint (less than one percent of beef’s footprint comes from its moving from processor to store).  Additionally, 20 percent of all meat sold in the U.S. ends up in the trash.

The graphics are simple and elegant, conveying a lot of information in a concise manner.  And yet what if you could interact with that information in a more dynamic way, and use it while you shop?

The app Lisa Frack imagines starts simply as a consumer aid, informing customers as they shop, much like Fooducate. “But instead of using a bar code, maybe there can be a square that can tell you what you need to know about foods,” says Frack.  “Like if I could find out about sliced turkey while I am standing at the deli counter, maybe I could remember what someone told me about nitrates.”

But additionally, Frack sees a more powerful element to the app, one in which shoppers could alert companies to the loss of a sale because of the information learned about a product. “The minute a consumer decides not to buy a product, the app could  immediately enable the person to send that information to the company telling them they lost the sale,” says Flack.  “Companies could then see what people are not buying, and we could communicate more easily to them about what we don’t want to buy.”

About Beth Hoffman:
Beth Hoffman has reported on food and agriculture for ten years, airing on NPR, The World, Latino USA, Living on Earth, KUER and KALW , and studied the food system in depth as a fellow and co-lecturer in the Africa Reporting Project at UC Berkeley’s School of Journalism. Hoffman competed a year long documentary project cooking with immigrant women in their homes, has traveled to India, Uganda and Ethiopia to report on rice production and chicken farming, and did a multipart series for KUER on the artistic, cultural and environmental connections we have to food. In addition to spending many hours on-farm in Utah, California and abroad, Hoffman also married into an Iowa farm family and is currently working with her husband to slowly convert the land into a sustainable orchard and hog farm. She currently lives in Albany, California. Hoffman’s previous work can be found on her website at bethaudio.com.
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  • Anonymous

    Sadly that chart is highly deceptive. There is a tremendous difference between CAFO meat production which is intensely dependent on petroleum vs pastured production like ours which uses almost no petroleum.
     
    We produce pork with a negative carbon footprint – the exact opposite of that chart. Contrary to common perception you can not grow pigs on pasture without grain. We buy no commercial feed or grains for our pigs. They thrive on pasture/hay and excess dairy for almost all of their diet. We’ve been doing it for nearly a decade, supplying local stores, restaurants and individuals year round with weekly deliveries.  See: http://SugarMtnFarm.com/pigs

    • Beth Hoffman

      The Environmental Working Group is clear they used the lifecycle of the more “popular” foods most people eat, and that unfortunately means industrially produced meats. They would love someone to do the next step in the study looking at the differences between small scale, pasture raised animals and the ones finished in feed lots and the like, but that was not in the parameters of this study.

      I would encourage you to look at some of the information within the study however, particularly the info on transportation and methane release from animals – both of which state that there is actually little evidence pasture raised and “conventional” meats differ vastly in these areas.

  • http://www.honestmeat.com/ Rebecca T.

    Creating a meat buying app would be really dumbing down the food system and not looking at all the intricacies that do into the life cycle of a product. The EWG chart is one of the worst uses of LCA (Life Cycle Analysis) that I have seen. Using a one-size-fits-all approach to figuring out the environmental impacts of a meat is why lamb gets listed as the so-called “worst choice”. Let me get this straight- an animal that takes less than a year to get to slaughter weight purely on photosynthetic energy with no other inputs is considered Unsustainable? It is probably the MOST sustainable protein choice one could hope for! No tillage or fossil fuels required! Please don’t make a meat buying app. Perhaps instead you could create an application that describes all of the words, label claims, and eco-certifications that are out there on meat products so that consumers could be more informed about their choices. Thanks!