How Green Are Your Eating Habits?

Eating is something most of us do without thinking much about it. Those who've attempted diets or decided to go vegetarian will attest to this?once you try to change your eating habits you realize just how set in your culinary ways you are. But maybe, if we knew just how much of an impact our consumption habits actually had, it might give us all a little extra motivation to start eating in a more eco-friendly manner.

And that's the concept behind the Eating Green Calculator. It aims to show you the unfortunate environmental burden the way we eat creates.

Because calculating your carbon footprint is tough enough when left to your own devices, this calculator will take some simple inputs (how much beef, chicken, eggs, cheese, and milk you eat each week) and estimate the damage your eating habits are doing.

After taking the test myself, the calculator informed me that my individual diet is taking up .5 acres of grains and grass needed for animal feed, necessitating the use of 20 lbs of fertilizer and .2 lbs of pesticide, and generating over 3000 lbs of carbon dioxide-rich manure. Every year.

And while some of those numbers might not seem like a lot, consider the fact that I'm a pretty healthy eater, and limit my beef and pork intake every week. And that there are more than 200 million eaters better and worse than me in the US alone. It just goes to show that consuming foods of the kinds and at the rates we are is entirely unsustainable.

Now, bear in mind that this calculator is by no means an end-all, foolproof tool?it never asks how many vegetables you eat every week, or whether the beef you eat is grass fed or not, or whether you eat locally. But it's nonetheless a good exercise in estimating how much impact you're inadvertently responsible for?and moving you to help change it.