Eating differently against the climate crisis | Part 1

Our eating habits are not just unhealthy. They also continue to heat the climate. According to the Öko-Institut, half of all greenhouse gases will come from agriculture in 2050. Main problems: The high meat consumption, monocultures, the intensive use of pesticides, methane from and land use for animal husbandry, food waste and the many ready meals.

In a small series, I present the points at which we can all work against the climate crisis without much effort by changing our diet

Part 1: Ready Meals: The Downside of Convenience

Tear open the package, put your food in the microwave, the meal is ready. With its “convenience” products, the food industry makes our everyday lives easier - and fills the accounts of its managers and shareholders. Two thirds of all food consumed in Germany is now industrially processed. Every third day there is ready-made food in the average German family. Even if cooking is back in fashion, cooking shows on television attract a large audience and people in Corona times are paying more attention to healthy eating: The trend towards ready-made meals continues. More and more people are living alone. Cooking is not worth it for many.

The Federal Ministry of Economics (BMWi) has 618.000 employees in the German food industry in 2019. In the same year, according to the BMWi, the industry increased its sales by 3,2 percent to 185,3 billion euros. It sells two thirds of its products on the domestic market.

The traffic light for eating

Whether with meat, fish or vegetarian - very few consumers understand exactly what ready-made meals are made of and how the composition affects their health. That is why the controversial “food traffic light” has been in place in Germany since autumn 2020. It's called "Nutriscore". “Consumer protection” - and Agriculture Minister Julia Klöckner, with industry behind her, fought it with her hands and feet. She doesn't want people to "dictate what to eat". In a survey by their ministry, most citizens saw things differently: Nine out of ten wanted the label to be quick and intuitive. 85 percent said that a food traffic light helps to compare the goods.

Now the food manufacturers can decide for themselves whether they want to print the Nutriscore on their product packs. Unlike a traffic light in the three colors green (healthy), yellow (medium) and red (unhealthy), the information differentiates between A (healthy) and E (unhealthy). There are plus points for a high protein content, fiber, nuts, fruits and vegetables in the product. Salt, sugar and high calorie count have a negative effect.

The consumer protection organization Foodwatch compared ready-made foods that looked identical in spring 2019 and rated them according to the rules of Nutriscore. The grade A went to a cheap muesli from Edeka and a weak D to a significantly more expensive one from Kellogs: "Reasons are the high proportion of saturated fats, the lower fruit content, the higher number of calories and more sugar and salt," reports the "Spiegel" .

9.000 kilometers for a cup of yogurt

The Nutirscore does not take into account the often catastrophic environmental and climate footprint of the products. The ingredients of a Swabian strawberry yoghurt cover a good 9.000 kilometers on the streets of Europe before the filled cup leaves the plant near Stuttgart: Fruits from Poland (or even China) travel to the Rhineland for processing. The yoghurt cultures come from Schleswig-Holstein, the wheat powder from Amsterdam, parts of the packaging from Hamburg, Düsseldorf and Lüneburg.

The buyer is not informed about this. On the package there is the name and location of the dairy as well as the abbreviation of the federal state in which the cow gave her milk. Nobody has asked what the cow ate. It is mostly concentrated feed made from soy plants that have grown on former rainforest areas in Brazil. In 2018, Germany imported food and feed to the value of 45,79 billion euros. The statistics include ingredients for cattle feed as well as palm oil from the burned down rainforest areas on Borneo or apples flown in from Argentina in the summer. We can ignore the latter in the supermarket as well as Egyptian strawberries in January. If such products end up in ready meals, we have little control over them. The packaging only states who manufactured and packaged the product and where.

In 2015, the unsuspecting “Focus” reported about 11.000 children in Germany who were believed to have caught the norovirus while eating frozen strawberries from China. Title of the story: “The absurd ways of our food”. It is still cheaper for German companies to bring North Sea shrimp to Morocco for pulping than to process them on site.

Mysterious ingredients

Even the designations of origin protected in the EU do not solve the problem. There is more “Black Forest ham” on German supermarket shelves than there are pigs in the Black Forest. The manufacturers buy the meat cheaply from fatteners abroad and process it in Baden. So they comply with the regulations. Even consumers who want to buy goods from their region have no chance. The Focus quotes surveys: Most consumers said they would pay more for regional, high-quality products if they knew how to recognize them. More than three out of four respondents stated that they could not, or only with difficulty, assess the quality of bag soups, frozen food, packaged sausage or cheese from the refrigerated shelf. They all look the same and the colorful packs literally promise the blue of the sky with pictures of happy animals in an idyllic landscape. The organization Foodwatch awards the most brazen advertising fairy tales in the food industry with the “golden cream puff” every year.

The result of the game of confusion: Because consumers do not know what exactly is in the pack and where the ingredients come from, they buy the cheapest. A survey by consumer advice centers in 2015 confirmed that expensive products are not necessarily healthier, better or more regional than the cheap ones. The higher price flows primarily into the company's marketing.

And: if it says strawberry yoghurt, it doesn't always contain strawberries. Many manufacturers are replacing fruits with cheaper, more artificial flavorings. Lemon cakes often do not contain lemons, but may contain preservatives such as the nicotine breakdown product cotinine or parabens, which scientists believe to have hormone-like effects. Rule of thumb: "The more processed the food, the more additives and flavorings it usually contains," writes Stern magazine in its nutrition guide. If you would like to eat what the name of a product promises, you should choose organic products or cook your own with fresh, regional ingredients. Fruit yogurt is easy to make yourself from yogurt and fruits. You can see and touch fresh fruit and vegetables. Dealers must also indicate where they are from. The only problem: the often high residues of pesticides, especially in non-organic goods.