Standardized Recipes and Their Influence on the Environmental Impact Assessment of Mixed Dishes: A Case Study on Pizza

Abstract

Food and diet life cycle assessment (LCA) studies offer insights on the environmental performance and improvement potential of food systems and dietary patterns. However, the influence of ingredient resolution in food-LCAs is often overlooked. To address this, four distinct decomposition methods were used to determine ingredients for mixed dishes and characterize their environmental impacts, using the carbon footprint of the U.S. daily pizza intake as a case study. Pizza-specific and daily pizza intake carbon footprints varied substantially between decomposition methods. The carbon footprint for vegetarian pizza was 0.18–0.45 kg CO2eq/serving, for meat pizza was 0.56–0.73 kg CO2eq/serving, and for currently consumed pizzas in the U.S. (26.3 g/person/day; 75 pizzas types) was 0.072–0.098 kg CO2eq/person/day. These ranges could be explained by differences in pizza coverage, ingredient resolution, availability of ingredient environmental information, and ingredient adjustability for losses between decomposition methods. From the approaches considered, the USDA National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference, which reports standardized food recipes in relative weights, appears to offer the most appropriate and useful food decompositions for food-LCAs. The influence and limitations of sources of reference flows should be better evaluated and acknowledged in food and diet LCAs.

Spatialized Life Cycle Assessment of Fluid Milk Production and Consumption in the United States

“…Human health impacts of fluid milk consumption represent 0.26% of the annual average impact of a person living in the U.S. (Figure 5), 5.5 µDALY/kg FPCM consumed , with 1.2 µDALY/kg FPCM consumed for respiratory inorganics impact and 4.1 µDALY for climate change impacts. Interestingly, this is in the same order of magnitude as the nutritional beneficial effects of milk on reducing colon cancer, which is on the order of 4.5 µDALY per kg FPCM [81,84]. The overall impacts on human health of raw milk production (i.e., at farm gate) represent 0.7% of the annual average impact of a person living in the U.S.…”

“…a b A µDALY or 10 −6 DALY correspond to 1 per million of a disabilityadjusted life year, or DALY. Since there are 31.5 million seconds in a year, 1 µDALY corresponds to 31.6 s or 0.53 min of healthy life lost[81]. c Normalized total impacts in parenthesis.…”

Estimation of Carbon Dioxide Emissions from a Traditional Nutrient-Rich Cambodian Diet Food Production System Using Life Cycle Assessment

“…Therefore, the carbon dioxide emissions per product, including cereal, rice, beef, chicken, pork, fish, egg, butter, vegetable, fruit, and milk, were 0.50 kg, 2.55 kg, 26.61 kg, 3.65 kg, 5.77 kg, 3.49 kg, 3.46 kg, 9.25 kg, 0.37 kg, 0.42 kg, and 1.29 kg, respectively [19]. The emissions from fast food, pizza, were 3.5 kg CO 2 eq/kg pizza, in which cheese, meat, and solid fat made up 43%, 21%, and 21%, respectively [40]. Therefore, the dairy emissions were 0.37 kg CO 2 eq.…”

Augmenting the National Nutrition Data System to Promote Diet Sustainability Analyses

“…The FCID has been used to estimate exposure to a wide range of chemicals and compounds such as food additives [ 41 ], metals [ 42 , 43 ], bisphenol A [ 44 ], foodborne pathogens [ [45] , [46] , [47] ], and others [ [48] , [49] , [50] , [51] , [52] , [53] , [54] , [55] , [56] ]. Because FCID is the only food composition database that disaggregates mixed dishes into commodity-specific foods, others have used it to estimate the consumption of mushrooms [ [57] , [58] , [59] , [60] ], rice [ 53 , 54 , [61] , [62] , [63] , [64] ], multiple types of lentils and legumes [ [45] , [46] , [47] , 65 ], beef [ [66] , [67] , [68] , [69] , [70] ], pork [ 66 , 67 , 69 , 70 ], poultry [ 51 , 52 , 66 , 67 , 69 , 70 ], seafood [ 67 , 69 , 70 ], multiple types of plant oils [ 71 , 72 ], water [ 73 ], and others [ 74 ]; as well as mixed dishes such as pizza [ 75 ]; and food groups such as dairy [ 69 , 70 ], fruit [ 76 ], vegetables [ 76 ], and nuts and seeds [ 69 , 70 ...…”