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Another up-and-coming trend is carbon footprint labeling and marketing.

Some emerging groups are promoting that you should lower your carbon footprint. But can carbon footprints really be calculated accurately? Supposed food carbon “calculators” and “quizzes” aren’t verified or standardized. They’re just biased efforts that assign an environmental footprint to foods, based on random assumptions and unproven methods.

At this point in time, there isn’t any science-based formula that can accurately estimate the carbon footprint of each item in the food supply. In addition, we really don’t know whether measuring the carbon footprint of different foods is going to matter, environmentally speaking.

Beef is estimated to emit the largest amount of GHG when compared to other animal proteins like pork, dairy, chicken, and farmed fish. It’s estimated that about half of the emissions from beef are from methane. According to Our World in Data, chocolate and coffee also produce GHG emissions, right behind beef. Still, because beef is often equated with these larger GHG emissions, the beef industry is targeted as a potential way to reduce emissions. It may be a short-sighted solution.

Every diet has an impact on the environment, as do all our actions. Food, however, also provides nutrition. It’s only recently that the field of nutrition and the environment are more often considered together, rather than separately. Some scientists feel that the environmental footprint should be considered in the context of the nutritional footprint, however. It’s highly likely that the healthiest diets (calorie moderate, low in saturated fat, high in fiber) are those that are both healthy for the body and the planet.

Carbon footprints are determined by measuring “carbon dioxide equivalents.” This unit of measurement was adopted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). From here, there’s some complicated math involved to quantify the GHG emissions of a product. In terms of say, beef, methane is the GHG; however, methane is a short-lived gas, and quantifying the methane produced by ruminant animals is a little bit tricky. Due to the difference in methane’s shorter lifetime, carbon footprints of foods such as beef or lamb don’t really reflect their long-term impact on temperature.