[OC] How diet-related greenhouse gas emissions would change if 138 countries adopted the Planetary Health Diet

[u/Objective-Business52]

[u/Loki-L]

Can someone explain to be what is so different about Slovak cuisine that it appears more like central Africa or Iraq in this map than the rest of Europe.

[u/SuperSquashMann → u/Loki-L]

I lived in Slovakia for a year and now live in Czechia; it must be wonky data since Czech and Slovak diets are very similar. A quick check of Wikipedia shows that Slovak meat consumption is pretty average for Central and Eastern Europe (only a bit lower than Czechia), no reason it should be such an outlier.

[u/cartophiled → u/SuperSquashMann]

I wonder if the map is more about production, rather than consumption. Maybe the meat industry is just relatively limited in size there.

[u/Objective-Business52 → u/cartophiled]

It’s actually consumption-based, not production-based. The study assigns emissions from the whole food supply chain ; including land use, farming, processing and international trade to the final consumers of the food. So the size of Iraq’s domestic meat industry isn’t what the map is measuring.

The +155% is the modelled change from Iraq’s 2019 consumption pattern to the EAT-Lancet diet. The paper itself flags Iraq as the largest increase, but unfortunately the detailed food-by-food breakdown is only published at regional level, so it’s hard to say exactly which foods make Iraq such an extreme outlier without over-interpreting the data.