Levelling foods for priority micronutrient value can provide more meaningful environmental footprint comparisons

Summary

Abstract A growing literature in Life Cycle Assessment seeks to better inform consumers, food policymakers, food supply chain actors, and other relevant stakeholders about how individual foods contribute to sustainable diets. One major challenge involves accurately capturing potential trade-offs between nutritional provision and environmental impacts associated with food production. In response, food system sustainability literature has turned increasingly to nutritional Life Cycle Assessment, which assesses the environmental footprints of different foods while accounting for nutritional value. Here we provide examples that show how environmental footprints based on a priority micronutrient-focused functional unit can provide nutritionally meaningful insights about the complexities involve