The Hidden Environmental Costs of Food

Estimated Environmental cost

+$ 22.02

As pricey as a run to the grocery store has become, our grocery bills would be considerably more expensive if environmental costs were included, researchers say. The loss of species as cropland takes over habitat. Groundwater depletion. Greenhouse gases from manure and farm equipment.

For years, economists have been developing a system of “true cost accounting” based on a growing body of evidence about the environmental damage caused by different types of agriculture. Now, emerging research aims to translate this damage to the planet into dollar figures.

By displaying these so-called true prices, sometimes next to retail prices, researchers hope to nudge consumers, businesses, farmers and regulators to factor in the environmental toll of food.

The proponents of true cost accounting don’t propose raising food prices across the board, but they say that increased awareness of the hidden environmental cost of food could change behavior.

We asked True Price, a Dutch nonprofit group that has pioneered true cost accounting alongside the United Nations and the Rockefeller Foundation, to provide a window into some of their research. They came up with a data set that compares the estimated environmental costs of common foods produced in the United States, divided into three categories: Climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions, water usage, and ecosystem effects from land use, including loss of biodiversity.

“These costs are going to be paid,” said Claire van den Broek, managing director at True Price. “They’re paid in the healthcare system, in climate adaptation mechanisms, and those will come back in taxes. It’s not like these costs are fictional.”

We ran True Price’s methodology by other experts, who found it to be generally sound, if sometimes vague. As higher quality data becomes available, they said, the efforts to quantify the environmental impact of food should improve. (True cost accounting also typically includes things like labor rights and dietary health, but here we’re focusing on environmental costs.)

Alexander Müller, founder of the TMG Think Tank for Sustainability, a research organization based in Berlin, has worked with True Price for some specific analyses and has reviewed its approach in depth. “While we believe that True Price’s methodology has some shortcomings, it is among the best available given our current knowledge,” he said, noting that he did not think responsibility for changing consumption should be placed on the individual.

One of the biggest criticisms of true cost accounting is how hard it is to calculate a specific dollar amount for costs that are so diffuse and ignored in the market. Even its supporters acknowledge that it’s inherently imprecise. Other economists say the figures can amount to not much more than guesses.

“There’s so much variety in how things are produced that I’m skeptical of attempts to put any number on the environmental costs of doing something,” said Scott Swinton, a professor of agricultural economics at Michigan State University.

Roger Cryan, chief economist at the American Farm Bureau Federation, a group that represents farmers, faults true cost analyses for undervaluing the benefits of affordable food.

Nevertheless, some governments are using this research to design policies that account for food’s environmental effects. New York State, for example, is working with Cornell University researchers to develop a tool to factor them into procurement decisions, rather than just picking the cheapest bid. And Denmark is introducing the world’s first tax on methane emitted by cows, pigs and sheep.

Large disparities between the retail price of food and its environmental costs are found in the proteins many of us eat every day. This article used prices from Walmart.com, the largest U.S. grocery retailer, because government averages were not available for some protein sources. It does not include an example of fish because environmental damage from fisheries is harder to assess and compare with impacts on land, True Price researchers said.

Beef has the highest environmental costs of the foods we examined, pound for pound, and it wasn’t close. Cattle are very inefficient at converting what they eat into body weight. For every 100 grams of protein a cow eats, less than 4 grams end up in the beef we eat.

Cows are ruminants, and their burps send enormous amounts of planet-warming methane into the atmosphere. That’s in addition to U.S. methane emissions from the fossil-fuel industry, which are growing.

But most of the environmental cost of eating beef, as calculated by True Price, comes from the amount of land that’s needed to grow cattle feed.

Where your beef comes from matters, a lot. Data from Hestia, a group based at Oxford University that provides data about the environmental effects of food, shows that, on average, producing one pound of beef in North America takes up more than two times as much land as it does in Europe.

The True Price analysis covers the average costs of producing beef in the United States. Environmental costs can add up exponentially if cattle or their feed have displaced an ecosystem with high carbon-storage potential and rich biodiversity.

This analysis also doesn’t account for the human health costs of beef overconsumption, which are significant.

Cheese has a higher environmental cost than chicken or pork on a pound-for-pound basis, which may seem surprising.

Some of that comes from the methane emissions associated with cows (sheep and goats, too). But, although smaller than those of beef, the biggest effects from cheese stem from the cropland and pasture required to feed dairy cows.

Cheese production is very water-intensive. Dairy cows require more water than their beef counterparts, often consuming 30 to 50 gallons of water per day. Milk, after all, is mostly water. Although milk production has grown more efficient over the past half-century, the growing number of dairies in the arid American West has increased the sector’s overall water use.

Some research indicates that fresh and soft cheeses have a lower environmental cost than hard ones.

Chicken is less environmentally harmful than beef and pork, in part because chickens are smaller and grow faster, so it takes less food to fatten them up. They also emit much less methane than other livestock because they don’t ruminate like cows and they produce proportionally less manure than most animals we eat.

Chicken producers have grown more efficient and can now get roughly one pound of meat for every two pounds of feed, said Mario Herrero, a professor of food systems at Cornell University. But that has a cost to the welfare of animals, he added, which the analysis doesn’t account for. “For them to grow like that, you need to grow them mostly in industrial conditions,” he said.

The amount of chicken we eat adds up. In the aggregate, though chickens eat far less than cattle, they consume a little over a third of the animal feed produced in the world, in the form of corn and soybeans.

A lot of the chicken we produce is turned into nuggets and other processed foods. The factories that make those products have their own environmental costs, such as water use, which the analysis also doesn’t take into account.

Soy is one of the fastest-growing crops in the world, but the vast majority of the world’s soy goes to animal feed. Eating soy directly would be a lot more efficient. Tofu, which is made of processed soy, is a way of doing that. It delivers about half as much protein as meat, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and uses less water than other plant-based proteins like lentils.

But factories that process soybeans into tofu can emit a lot of planet-warming gases if they get their energy from fossil fuels like natural gas.

Again, location matters. Tofu produced with soy grown in the United States is generally not associated with recent deforestation. But, like any crop, it’s still occupying land where trees or grasslands could grow, and that has an environmental opportunity cost. Because demand for soy is growing with the world’s appetite for meat, several major soy producers, such as Brazil, grow some soy in newly deforested land.

Farms that grow soybeans very often use pesticides that many experts consider harmful to people, such as glyphosate. Those impacts are not reflected in the numbers above.

If you’re looking for a low-impact source of protein, meet the humble chickpea. It has deep roots and requires little water or fertilizer, and so can be grown without irrigation even in arid regions. Most of the global crop is both produced and consumed in India, but the U.S. Mountain West states have started growing more chickpeas, which enrich soil when rotated with other crops.

Chickpeas vs. meat: One-quarter cup of cooked chickpeas has the protein equivalent of one ounce of cooked meat, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Recommended portions of meat are typically three or four ounces, about the size of a deck of cards, so about a cup of cooked chickpeas would offer up a similar amount of protein. (The same goes for lentils, another low-impact protein.)

Cooking complicates the picture. The analysis uses dried chickpeas, but according to a recent lifecycle assessment of the environmental effects of dried beans, peas, and lentils, the largest cost comes at the consumer stage, which the analysis doesn’t take into account. Chickpeas take more time to rehydrate than lentils, but pressure cookers use less energy than boiling them in an open pot.

How more data could change our food system

Can sticker shock help?

Few people in the true cost movement want to actually raise prices for consumers. Not many shoppers would voluntarily pay true prices if they could just go to conventional grocery stores instead. Even if they did, it wouldn’t be easy to use the extra money to solve the harms caused by food production.

And of course, low food prices have benefits, like affordability for low-income people.

But research shows that prices can be a powerful signal for those trying to shrink their food’s environmental footprint. The Impact Institute, True Price’s sister nonprofit group, has piloted grocery store experiments in the Netherlands that include both the “true price” as well as the price paid at the register. One grocer in Germany actually did charge true prices for a few weeks, and saw a sharp decrease in purchases of meats and cheeses.

The goal for researchers is twofold: First, prompt people to shift to foods with lower costs, which generally means more plants and less beef. And second, as true pricing methods become more detailed, consumers could choose the cheese with the lowest impact, for example, rather than giving it up entirely.

Where tax dollars go

More readily available true prices could also push governments to reconsider how they incentivize our food system. Each year, billions of dollars of tax dollars go toward making meat and dairy products cheaper, for example by subsidizing insurance for farmers who grow animal feed.

Better data, smarter food production

Researchers also hope that true prices could eventually push farmers and agrifood companies to change how they operate. That could mean using water and pesticides more sparingly, or rotating cattle so they don’t degrade land and riverbanks, or switching to electric power for transportation and manufacturing.

Measures like these may seem prohibitively expensive or risky to farmers and ranchers. But some changes, like using renewable energy and investing in soil quality, can reduce the true cost of their products and also save money over the long run.

A 2023 working paper by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization called true cost accounting “a potential game-changer because it can be used to promote investment in those businesses that prioritize social benefits and operate within planetary boundaries.” It cautions that “numerous gaps need to be filled,” by standardizing methods and collecting more data. As the research develops, incentives may change as well.