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What does it cost the planet to put this food on your plate? We measure three things you can hold in your head: the climate cost in carbon dioxide, the land it takes to grow, and the water it drinks up. The numbers come from published life-cycle research, with honest ranges so you can see how much wiggle room each estimate has.
One food, two foods side by side, a full day of eating, or every metric at once.
Life-cycle research can measure many things, but only some have strong enough per-food evidence to publish honestly. We start with the three you probably already think about: climate, land, and water.
The greenhouse gases released to grow, raise, and harvest the food, added up as if they were all carbon dioxide. Beef is around 10 kg per 100 g you eat. Lentils are around 0.4 kg.
How much farmland it takes to produce the food, weighted by how long the land is held. Beef sits near 9 square-metre-years per 100 g. A head of lettuce is closer to half a square metre.
The freshwater drawn from rivers and aquifers to grow the food, weighted by how scarce that water is locally. Almonds in California carry a much higher water cost than the same almonds in Spain.
Five things happen behind the scenes when you score a food.
Every food has a published climate, land, and water figure based on averages from many real farms and producers. When the matching is uncertain, we fall back to the average for the food group, which is a less precise but still defensible number.
Real farms vary a lot. A litre of milk from one dairy can carry many times the climate cost of a litre from another. We show a low, a central, and a high estimate so you see how much that variability matters. These are envelopes from published farm-level data, not statistical confidence intervals.
You can ask the same question four ways: per serving, per 100 calories, per 100 grams, or per gram of protein. Per-calorie is the default because it stops a cucumber from looking artificially cheap next to a bowl of pasta.
Climate is the same wherever the gases come from, but water scarcity is not. You can score a food with global average water-scarcity weights or pick a country so the water number reflects where the food is actually grown.
When you score a food from the Canadian catalogue, we use a language model to choose the best life-cycle entry from a shortlist of real candidates, not to make one up. If the model is not confident enough, we fall back to the group average and flag the match openly.
Pizza, stew, and casserole are not a single ingredient. When you score one, we break it into the ingredients that make it up, score each, and combine them by mass. The breakdown is shown so you can see what is driving the total.
The numbers do not change. The explanation does. Pick the view that fits why you are looking.
Climate, land, and water in plain language, with a quick read on whether this food sits low, medium, or high for its group. No formulas, no acronyms.
Full life-cycle method, how the food was matched, the data quality rating behind the matched entry, and a parallel set of values from a second method as a cross-check.
Population-level framing for procurement, taxation, and labelling decisions. Includes an optional dollar value of the climate impact using the Government of Canada's published social cost of carbon.
Every food you score is drawn from the same catalogue used by every other tool here. That is 5,691 foods from Canada's national food file, plus 1,028 West African staples from the FAO regional table. The matcher resolves either source against the life-cycle catalogue the same way.
Other regional food tables can plug in later through the same setup.
Climate and land numbers come from a peer-reviewed meta-analysis of thousands of real farms (Poore & Nemecek, Science, 2018), combined with France's national life-cycle catalogue AGRIBALYSE, which holds 2,425 commodity-level entries. Water uses a separate published source that tracks scarcity by region.
Each catalogue entry carries a data-quality rating, and most entries meet a good-enough bar. A handful of entries are known to have published errors in the source data, and we flag those clearly when they appear in your result.
Environmental impact is one of six measures on all scores. Sustainability decisions rarely live alone. Diet quality, healthy-life minutes, product-level ratings, and a Food Guide read travel with the environmental view on the same panel.