Let's Bust These 8 Sustainability Myths For Good!
5 December 2024
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Photo credit: The Sustainable Restaurant Association (TSRA)
IN THIS ARTICLE, WE BREAK DOWN THE FACTS BEHIND SOME COMMON SUSTAINABILITY MISCONCEPTIONS.
1. Local food always has a lower carbon impact.
‘Food miles’ might spring to mind when you think about the carbon footprint of food – but the truth is that how far a food has travelled is just one piece in a greater, more complex carbon puzzle. It is true that sourcing ingredients from far afield may have a significant carbon impact, particularly if they have been air freighted – but by far the biggest portion of any food’s environmental impact actually comes from production, not transport.
In fact, for most foods, transport accounts for less than 10% of total emissions. For foods with high emissions – like beef – this figure can be as little as 0.5%! The energy used in production also has a far bigger impact than you may think. For example, tomatoes grown in energy-intensive heated greenhouses in the UK may actually have a higher carbon footprint than those imported from Mediterranean countries where they can ripen naturally in the sun – even when taking the extra transport into account.
It’s also important to remember that sustainability is multi-faceted and encompasses much more than carbon; things like soil health, water use, waste management, pollution, animal welfare and fair treatment of workers can all affect the overall impact of a food, too. While it’s not necessarily always the lowest-carbon option, local food does have plenty of very important benefits.
Short, local supply chains are far more resilient in the face of climate shocks or international conflicts. Buying locally can also support small-scale agriculture, keeps more money in the regional economy and helps a business put down deeper roots in its community. Celebrating provenance on menus encourages customers to feel a stronger connection to the meals they choose. Plus, without long journeys or weeks of refrigeration, you’re often getting fresh, in-season produce when it’s at its absolute best – and often at a more reasonable price.
2. Sustainability certifications like Fairtrade are flawed and expensive, so they’re not worth having.
Maintaining true visibility over your supply chain is critical for hospitality businesses – but can be difficult and time-consuming. Responsible sourcing means buying from environmentally and socially ethical sources that minimise the impact they have on the world. This practice starts at the very beginning of the supply chain, and includes taking care of the people who grow, gather and harvest the produce you buy, as well as the communities and local environments where they live and work. It means guaranteeing a living income for producers and supporting environmentally positive farming and fishing practices.
For foods you can source locally, this is relatively easy to manage; however, it becomes trickier when you’re looking for ingredients from other countries, and is especially challenging when it comes to high-risk ingredients (like avocados, chillies, citrus, cocoa, coffee, nuts, palm oil, certain types of seafood or soy). For businesses that don’t take extra care in sourcing these foods, the issues inherent in these supply chains can often translate to reputational and financial risks. This is where reliable third-party bodies like Fairtrade, the Rainforest Alliance, the MSC blue tick and organic certification can really help F&B operators, especially across these high-risk items.
Third-party certifications remain imperfect; while it is certainly true that they have created much positive change in the industry to date, it is frustrating that these processes can mean additional admin and cost for small farmers, and that sometimes that barrier is too high. A great way for larger businesses to support the development of better agricultural practices is to guarantee financial support to smallholder farmers while they work to meet certification standards – for example, committing to buying a certain volume of potatoes while they bring their farm up to organic standards.
At the same time, if your business doesn’t have the resources, knowledge or capacity to validate things like worker conditions or environmental stewardship, thank goodness for third parties – they remain the best way to maintain transparency over the origins and impacts of the products you buy, and to ensure that the farmers and fishers in your supply chain are being treated fairly, to avoid greenwashing and to manage your own risk. With customers increasingly demanding transparency around their food choices, recognisable certifications are also a way to provide peace of mind and build trust.
3. Nutrition and health are separate issues to sustainability.
Nutrition and sustainability are far more entwined than you might suspect. In 2019, the EAT-Lancet Commission (a group of 37 scientists from 16 countries working in the fields of human health, nutrition, economics, agriculture, political sciences and environmental sustainability) developed data-driven global scientific targets that define a “safe operating space” for food systems. These targets focus on the two key areas that apply to all people and our planet: healthy diets and sustainable food production.
These are two sides of the same coin – what is good for the planet is, by and large, what is good for our bodies, too. Transitioning to more sustainable, diverse and plant-rich global diets means that climate, biodiversity and public health all reap the benefits.
Eating a varied diet is better for our health, but it also helps to take the pressure off specific crops and animals, protects biodiversity and makes our food systems more resilient. Diets rich in fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts and whole grains have a vastly smaller environmental footprint than meat-heavy diets or those that include a lot of ultra-processed foods. In addition to releasing high levels of greenhouse gases, producing meat demands incredibly high levels of water and land, contributes to deforestation, pollutes waterways and is, overall, an incredibly resource-inefficient way to feed populations. Meanwhile, in processes like refining, cooking, packaging and preserving, the production of ultra-processed foods requires a lot of energy and is often reliant on fossil fuels.
This is why ‘Feed People Well” is one of the 10 pillars of the Food Made Good Standard. Food businesses have an important role to play in educating their guests around better food choices and promoting healthier (yet still delicious!) dishes and drinks. In line with the international scientific guidelines set out by the EAT-Lancet Commission and WHO, we encourage F&B businesses to create and promote dishes that are not just delicious, but healthy and nutritious, too.
Photo credit: Ania Smelskaya of April Wines
4. Recyclable packaging is the most sustainable choice for takeaway service.
Of course, it’s important to recycle – but it shouldn’t be your first port of call. Plastic recycling is far less efficient and effective than is often suggested to consumers; in fact, did you know that, while around 75% of plastics produced are technically recyclable, just 9% of total plastics are actually recycled? This can be due to a lack of suitable recycling facilities or because the items themselves have not been properly cleaned; facilities won’t recycle packaging with food on it. Even where food waste has contaminated one or two items, an entire batch of otherwise recyclable materials may be deemed unsuitable and sent to landfill or incineration.
There are numerous other, better actions you can take when tackling non-organic waste. The waste hierarchy shows the best possible actions to take in every situation. Top of the list is to avoid creating waste in the first place – is there a way to do without the item altogether? To make the biggest impact, we all need to ask ourselves – before any buying decision – ‘Do I really need this?’ For restaurants with a takeaway offering, this can mean ditching unnecessary items like straws (except where needed by customers with disabilities), or only providing napkins when requested. It also means using long-life alternatives where possible. Think offering reusable coffee cups – returnable for a deposit – instead of disposable cups, or incentivising customers to bring their own containers and cutlery for takeaway food.
For items that have already been created and used, it’s important to consider whether they are truly ‘waste’ at all. Prioritising finding ways to repurpose and reuse items (with the goal of keeping them in use for as long as possible) is more efficient than recycling and has a much greater long-term impact. Only when an item truly can’t be used any longer – even parts of it – should it then be disposed of in the correct bin.
If you must include takeaway packaging as part of your offering, then look for biodegradable options that don’t need to be recycled. One outstanding example of this is the compostable taco boxes created by Wahaca. Working in partnership with Biopak and Deliveroo, the team at Wahaca developed clever, certified compostable packaging for their tacos. The custom BioCane trays are plastic-free and made from rapidly renewable sugarcane pulp, a by-product of the sugar refining industry. The result is compostable takeaway packaging that biodegrades naturally over a couple of months – you can literally bury it in your back garden!
Of course, recycling still has an important role to play – but there are smarter and more effective ways we can reduce our environmental impact.
5. Sustainability is all about My Carbon Footprint.
Environmental impact is usually the first thing that comes to mind when we think about sustainability: things like reducing emissions, switching to renewable energy, avoiding pollution, reducing water use, making food waste a thing of the past and working with suppliers to eliminate the use of plastics.
However, sustainability is complex and it requires a comprehensive approach. Carbon footprints are important and are a fantastic place to start but, especially for F&B businesses, the work needs to include more than environmental metrics. Sustainability in hospitality is a much bigger story; moving beyond the carbon narrative to a holistic, 360-degree approach is a more meaningful way to have an impact. We need to build progressive, resilient businesses – with people at their centres – that can carry us safely and responsibly into the future.
Sustainable sourcing is a central component of what it means to be a sustainable food business. How you choose to spend your procurement money matters: through responsible sourcing, chefs can create demand for better agricultural and fishing practices, driving positive chain through the supply chain.
Don’t forget about social sustainability, either. With so much urgency attached to environmental factors, the ‘S’ in ESG is too often forgotten, but it matters how F&B businesses treat the people in their network. From customers to staff, suppliers and stakeholders, everyone with whom your business interacts deserves respect, fairness and care. For one thing, restaurants play an invaluable role within their communities, functioning as ‘third spaces’ where people come together. Within the workplace itself, things like diversity and equity, work-life balance, zero tolerance for bullying and harassment and reasonable compensation must form part of any restaurant’s sustainability ambitions.
6. Ultimately, it’s up to the customer to make sustainable food choices.
While it might be tempting to put the onus for driving sustainability on the end consumer, research consistently shows that change has to be led by industry. Numerous studies highlight that people choose food not just through rational reflection, but are influenced by a wealth of other factors and especially by the food environment: by what’s available, affordable and accessible, and how it is being marketed to us.
This gives the hospitality sector enormous power when it comes to the dietary choices our customers make every day, in the immediate term within our establishments and in the longer term by influencing how they choose to eat at home. With this comes the responsibility to effect positive change, in terms of both public health and environmental impact. Restaurants and other food businesses sit at the crossroads between consumers and producers, with the opportunity to improve the food system on a global scale.
We won’t meet our climate targets without changing how we eat, and this will not happen if we expect individuals alone to make the change. The hospitality sector can help to fix the food system and ensure that good food – good on every level – is available and accessible for everyone.
7. Sustainability is a luxury that smaller businesses can’t afford.
Restaurants are incredibly busy and operating within a pressure cooker of a business environment; it’s easy for sustainability to get pushed to one side when everything else seems more urgent. However, there are some very real business benefits to doing this work, some of which have a direct and positive effect on some of the most pressing issues faced by hospitality operators today.
Doing this work in a transparent, honest and measurable way provides many customers with the peace of mind they want. This can improve brand reputation, attract more customers and build long-term loyalty. This goes for the people you employ, too: studies repeatedly show that people want to work for businesses that take care of both people and the planet. Improving your sustainability credentials means easier recruitment and better retention, both ongoing problems since the pandemic.
While sustainability can, of course, require some investment, it also leads to some very real cost reductions. Reducing food waste and implementing better management of energy and water use will save you money, while smart, sustainable menu design can also mean better margins on dishes. Local sourcing will reduce the costs of transporting your ingredients while also cutting out the middleman, which often means better quality food at a lower price. Finally, in the longer term, you’ll also be futureproofing your business against increasingly stringent environmental legislation coming down the line.
8. What I eat has no impact on biodiversity.
We all have the power to vote with our forks and to drive change by affecting demand. For restaurants, this opportunity is even greater.
Industrialising food production has had a hugely restrictive impact on global diets. It may seem like we have an incredible array of foods available to us, but in truth, our diets are narrow and repetitive. According to the FAO, humans have eaten around 6,000-7,000 plant species over the course of our existence. We now eat a miniscule fraction of this number, with a staggering 50% of all calories coming from just three plants: rice, wheat and maize.
We have built our modern food system on fragile foundations. Practices like monocropping have degraded our soils and greatly reduced natural biodiversity. Depending on a limited range of crops renders our food supply vulnerable to pests, disease outbreaks and the symptoms of our rapidly changing climate, like droughts, floods and heatwaves. This affects public health, too – no matter how far we feel from our hunter-gatherer ancestry, diverse diets remain crucial for our health.
The simple act of choosing ingredients outside of the mainstream can have far-reaching consequences. Foods like these are more likely to come from small-scale agriculture using sustainable methods, and are likely to have more impressive nutritional profiles and flavour; much has been lost in the industrialisation of our food systems. Encouraging farmers to grow a wider variety of foods helps to protect and restore our soils and preserves our planet’s edible biodiversity and our cultural heritage.
It’s important for chefs and restaurants to facilitate this dietary exploration by working with a wider range of ingredients: think heritage breeds, ancient grains, sea vegetables, less commonly used species of seafood and even invasive species that pose a threat to native flora and fauna.
Source: The Sustainable Restaurant Association
