Considering the Role of Life Cycle Analysis in Holistic Food Systems Research Policy and Practice

Abstract

Researchers use life cycle assessment (LCA) to evaluate the environmental impacts of foods, providing useful information to other researchers, policy-makers, consumers, and manufacturers. However, LCA is ill-equipped to account for desirable, often normatively valued, characteristics of food systems, such as redundancy, that could be considered more sustainable from a resilience perspective. LCA's requirement of a functional unit also causes methodological bias favoring efficiency over resilience and other difficult-to-quantify properties. This efficiency bias results in favorable evaluations of conventional production techniques and plant-based foods since they typically have the lowest impacts per unit of output when compared to alternative agriculture systems and animal-based foods. Such research findings may drive policymakers as well as consumers to prefer the more efficient options, with the possible outcome of diminishing resilience. This research and policy commentary explains why complementary assessment methodologies are necessary for comprehensive sustainability assessments that support a *

Environmental Impacts of Foods in the Adventist Health Study-2 Dietary Questionnaire

“…Despite the potential for food systems to improve human health and protect the environment, they are threatening both [2]. Significant environmental and human health issues can be traced back to food systems, especially Western diets [3][4][5][6]. The myriad environmental consequences of food production include deforestation, global warming, and eutrophication [7][8][9][10].…”

“…However, partially due to the specificity required and difficulty of obtaining primary data, there is a relative lack of LCA addressing highly processed foods, which is important due to the possibility that extensive processing may increase the environmental impacts of plant-based foods to rival or exceed those of animal-based foods [3,21]. Current dietary patterns are far from the traditional minimally processed patterns, including a significantly higher proportion of highly processed food.…”

“…Foods serve many different purposes, which makes the selection of a functional unit difficult, especially for such a wide variety of foods [3]. This study, therefore, included a weight-based functional unit of one kilogram of edible food, which is easily translated to nutritional metrics of concern based on nutritional facts data.…”

Evaluation of environmental and economic implications of a cold‐weather aquaponic food production system using life cycle assessment and economic analysis

“…LCA is a standardized method conceived to assess the environmental impacts associated with a product or process (Berardy et al., 2020). According to the International Standard Organization guidelines (ISO14040‐14044), LCA is comprised of four steps: goal and scope definition, inventory, impact analysis and results interpretation (ISO‐Norm, 2006; Wu et al., 2020).…”

Comparison of life cycle assessments and nutritional contents of soy protein and wheat protein (seitan) based vegan bacon products for human and environmental health

“…LCA of soy protein isolation was made according to Berardy et al 29 and Berk. 30 LCA of soybean farming was taken from software data with soybean seed planting and combined harvesting methods (Table 2).…”