KONIALIAN'S KITCHEN: SUSTAINABLE MEALS FOR YOUR WALLET AND THE PLANET
CARBON FOOTPRINT CALCULATIONS
How They Were Done
Carbon footprints for each recipe were estimated using The Vegan Society’s Carbon Food Calculator https://www.vegansociety.com/take-action/campaigns/plate-planet/carbon-calculator. This calculator derives the carbon footprint of a recipe by totaling the carbon equivalents of each ingredient. A user must choose the desired ingredient from a predetermined list, select the ingredient’s region or origin, and type in the amount of the ingredient used by weight. Once all of the ingredients are put in, the number of servings per recipe is required in order to calculate the footprint of the entire dish and each serving.
Disclaimer
Please recognize that the calculations for each recipe are not completely exact and they are simply ballpark estimates. There are many factors that impact an item’s footprint that cannot be accurately adjusted for. Such variables include, but are not limited to, location of production, transportation distance, and agriculture practices.
Due to the small amount of spices that were used per recipe, these ingredients were not included in the carbon calculation. Therefore, we must assume that the actual carbon footprint of each recipe is larger than what is listed on this website.
Small Decisions
There are many ingredients to choose from in this calculator; however, I had to make some substitutions and assumptions since not every food product I used was explicitly listed. For example, there is no option for lemons but there is an ingredient called “citrus”. So, in my recipes that called for lemons, I used citrus in the calculation.
It was not possible for me to determine the region of origin for the food items I used, so for my calculations I made the executive decision to assume North America as the location. It is very possible that some of my ingredients were produced and imported from other regions of the world. This could impact on the total carbon footprint since travel distance influences the amount of carbon emitted and growing practices differ in other places.
In the United States, people rarely measure the weight of an ingredient when cooking. It is much more common to use tools such as cups and measuring spoons. Since this calculator requires weight, I made sure to weigh each ingredient I used in grams. Grams were chosen as the unit of weight since this calculator displays the carbon equivalents using metric measurements. The carbon footprints are listed in kilograms for the entire dish and grams for each serving. For comprehension purposes, I converted these values to pounds.