We've taken over a restaurant...
..and invited five special guests to enjoy a unique dining experience.
Mushrooms, forget 'em! Get 'em out of there! LAUGHTER
This is a dinner party with a difference,
because our diners will be scored
on the environmental impact of every dish they choose.
To a lower carbon footprint!
THEY LAUGH
Food accounts for a third of all our greenhouse gas emissions.
So one of the biggest things we can do as individuals
to help the environment is change what we eat.
They're actually capturing carbon from the atmosphere,
which is one of the reasons why it's pretty good. Wow! Are they?
I feel a little halo coming around the back of my head.
We've created a delicious meal of delights.
This dinner is a competition.
And to win, our guests will have to choose the eco goodies
and avoid the eco nasties hidden in the menu.
So I can win this. Now I'm interested!
I'm mathematician Dr Hannah Fry.
As our guests are tucking into their dinner next door,
I'm going to be back here with some environmental scientists,
carefully calculating the carbon footprint
of every single item on the menu.
Got a spoon, chef. Get stuck in.
I'm former greengrocer Gregg Wallace.
Mm!
I'll be working with the kitchen team
to deliver a dinner full of surprises.
Whoa!
And sharing top tips and tricks to help us all cook the food we love,
while still being green.
These were frozen when they had the sun on them.
They're sweet, they're perfect.
It's time to reveal how we can all eat delicious food
that doesn't cost the Earth.
We're holding our carbon-counting dinner at a London restaurant.
The first of our guests to arrive is vegan and comedian, Sara Pascoe.
Have some water. Thank you.
Am I the first one here? You are indeed.
Feels like First Dates!
We haven't told the guests much, just that their slap-up meal
has got something to do with environmental eating.
I'm hoping that it won't be, you know, a full-on fight,
about who cares more about the world.
Next to arrive is journalist Amol Rajan.
He tries to be vegetarian,
but can't resist the occasional bucket of fried chicken.
Hey, Sara! Hi! Hello!
I'm good. I've got absolutely no idea what we're about to encounter.
Well, we get dinner. We get dinner? Yeah.
And it's a vaguely ethical exercise.
I just said yes when they said dinner.
THEY LAUGH Exactly.
Like most people, there is a gap between
what I think is the right thing to do and how I actually behave.
It's quite hard to say no when it's put in front of you.
In the kitchen, they've started the prep.
All the foods for the menu
have been carefully chosen by our science team.
Each with a very different carbon-footprint story.
Hannah, how have you been getting on with the scientists?
The criteria, I think I understand, but explain it to me.
I wanted to make sure that we were giving you some ingredients
that people could guess their environmental impact,
but some that may be a little bit left-field.
That is a challenge. What - giving you a list of ingredients
you have to make something from?
That's...that's...that's a challenge,
but these guys are professional chefs, they want to make it really good.
Mm. And any restriction you put on creativity is going to be tricky.
Next up, comedian Desiree Burch.
She's a sucker for seafood.
Hey, Desiree. Nice to see you. I'm Amol. Lovely to meet you.
I assume there's going to be plenty of gotchas
and we're going to be, like, "Oh, no", and then eat it, anyway?
Now, food critic and meat-eater, Matthew Fort.
Water? Yes. There's water. Help yourself.
The fifth and final guest is consumer journalist Nikki Fox,
also a keen carnivore.
Hey! Hi, guys!
Lovely to meet you all. I'm Nikki.
I love, like, a good roast.
I love a fry-up. I love a fry-up!
Yorkshire puddings.
I can't wait to reveal the difficult, though tasty, challenge they face.
Good evening. Welcome.
This is going to be, I think, a great dinner party,
but a dinner party with a difference.
Is it a good difference, Gregg? It's an enlightening difference.
Each of the dishes has been chosen
because it has an interesting carbon-footprint story.
Oh! Oh! Oh, OK.
What we are going to do is score each of you
on the carbon footprint of your choice.
So, it's a competition? Oh! Oh, yes.
So, I can win this? Now I'm interested.
This changes everything. It does.
So, do we choose on the basis
that we want to eat that particular dish,
or do we choose on the basis that we know
it's probably going to have more miles attached to it,
or have a bigger footprint?
Matthew... Oh, God! ..that's yours,
and I think everybody's, choice to make.
Depends how much you care about the planet, doesn't it? Yeah.
THEY LAUGH
Don't fix me with that beady little stare.
I'd like to offer you a drink.
We have white wine and red wine from Australia,
or a beer from southern Europe.
I will start with a beer.
Could I get a red, darling?
Can I just check - white wine, red wine,
beer, beer, abstains.
Yes. Thank you.
Please, ladies and gentlemen, have a look at your starters.
I'm excited about this.
Asparagus is basically my favourite food. Wow! These look great!
Some dishes have a low carbon footprint,
others are a total disaster.
But can our guests work out which is which?
So I mean, for pure taste, I would love a bit of salmon
cos I love horseradish. I would, as well. I would love it.
When it says poached salmon, it wasn't poached, that's the way of cooking it?
It's cooked in olive, presumably olive oil. Oh, my goodness!
Which again, has come from somewhere else.
I think soup is probably the lowest carbon footprint,
that celeriac and pear soup. Probably.
Well, food for thought there. Yes. Most certainly.
I'll leave you now while you ponder your starter choices. Enjoy.
You don't want to look at the plates and be able to guess from the off
which ones are going to be better than the others.
You want to make it so that...
Keep the celebrities guessing, basically, all the way through the menu.
I think they're all going to get it badly wrong.
I think they probably are, too.
Running our kitchen is critically-acclaimed chef, Mark Jarvis.
Hey! Chef! Hi, Gregg.
Right, listen, I know you're busy, I just want to ask you
about your philosophy of produce.
I'm passionate about where the food's come from,
how far it's travelled to get on to our plate,
and, can we get it better locally?
Can it be done better for the environment?
And can we do better, do you think, all of us?
I think we can all try. There's a change now.
People can get this sort of stuff if they look for it and want to get it,
and want to know where it comes from.
While Gregg is busy in the kitchen,
I have been working with a team of top environmental scientists.
In this meal, we are focusing on the carbon footprint of food,
and not the many other environmental issues
that are associated with food production.
Greenhouse gases pose a gigantic threat to our future.
Of course, they're not the only thing we have to worry about when it comes to the impact of our food.
There's things like biodiversity and habitat loss, too.
But this is something that we can calculate.
And hopefully, the results will make all of us make better food choices.
Helping me tot up the carbon scores is Professor Mike Berners-Lee
from the University of Lancaster.
Well, when it comes to calculating the carbon footprint
of different things, you are the man, right?
I have spent quite a lot of time doing it.
There's lots of different components to this, isn't there?
There's the carbon footprint of inputs to the fields, such as fertiliser.
Some animals burp up methane, which is a powerful greenhouse gas.
Then there's agricultural machinery required to harvest crops...
Which need fuel to run.
Then there's processing, then there's transport
and then there's packaging.
So all those things add up to the carbon footprint
that lands up in the food at your checkout.
Now, throughout all of this,
we're distilling everything down to numbers here.
Yeah. So the metric that we're using is carbon dioxide equivalent.
So what we're doing is we're taking all the greenhouse gases,
carbon dioxide's the most important one,
but there's also methane and nitrous oxide,
and we're rolling them into one metric,
called carbon dioxide equivalent.
Carbon dioxide equivalent is the measure currently used by the UN.
Calculations of carbon footprints involve many assumptions,
so are never exact,
but they do give useful approximations.
On average, each year, a British person creates the equivalent
of about three tonnes of carbon dioxide
from all of the food and drink that they eat.
That's about the same as a flight to Hong Kong.
This needs to drop dramatically
to meet our government's commitment of net-zero carbon by 2050,
and slow down the rate of global warming.
We've still got no idea what the diners are going to choose tonight.
No, that's absolutely right.
Some of the items have different fish,
some of them have meat, some of them are vegetarian.
But it's not just the headline ingredient,
it's also all the other things that go into it.
There could be butter, or non-dairy alternatives.
There could be vegetables that might be really sustainable,
or they might be horror stories that, um...
For reasons that nobody's thought about.
So a few surprises.
Oh, yeah. There's some big differences.
In the kitchen, Mark has to get the quantities just right,
as this affects the carbon score.
He needs to craft the ingredients,
carefully selected by the science team, into the best meals he can.
I'm very keen to know your preferences, please.
I'm going to go for the roasted asparagus, please, the salad.
Thank you. I'm going to go, cos I just love it,
so this is my heart, not my head, poached salmon.
I'm going to have incredibly boring,
but hopefully ethical celeriac and pear soup.
It's not boring.
I don't even want it, but, oh...
I think that sounds rather good, actually.
Well, then that's bad for the environment.
You're treating your body like a dustbin.
THEY LAUGH
You should order something that you want.
But I don't want asparagus, and I don't want to eat meat.
Well, I would love to have the steamed mussels, please.
And I think I'm going to go for the salmon as well.
Fascinating! THEY LAUGH
Enjoy!
I've got the starters, Chef! Excellent.
All right? I'll leave the docket there. Two salmon, one asparagus,
one soup, one mussels. Yes, Chef. Thank you. You get that, boys?
ALL: Yes, Chef! Let's go.
Most popular with our guests is the salmon.
It's also the most popular fish in our supermarkets,
making up a quarter of seafood sales.
You're plating up salmon, OK, does it sell in your restaurant?
It's probably the biggest selling fish that we have on.
That doesn't surprise me.
Cos if you go into supermarkets, there's so much of it.
And how do you feel about farmed salmon?
I've got a good trust in my suppliers that I know
that where they're getting it from, the farms.
So, yeah, I'm very confident and happy to have it on my menu.
A much less popular seafood than salmon,
but only half the price, is the humble mussel.
Mark, tell me what you know about mussels, please.
I know that these ones are rope grown out at sea,
so not gritty, good flavour,
nice and sweet, big, absolute brilliant product to work with.
And preparing them,
it's all about the shell being open or closed, isn't it?
That's correct. So you can do a couple of checks
like giving that quick knock-knock.
And when it shuts like that, you can see it shutting now,
he's good to go.
You want them closed before you cook them and open once they're cooked.
That's right, Gregg. Yep.
I absolutely love them.
Root vegetables are another great low-cost ingredient.
Mark's using one of the unsung heroes of root veg for his soup.
Obviously the go to in the UK would be potato, leek, onion.
So I chose celeriac cos you don't see anyone using it.
And so I thought it'd be great to try and make something out of that.
It's got a fantastic flavour.
We've got some lovely pears here and some lovely pear juice.
I like the flavour from the sweetness of the pear
going with the celeriac.
The earthiness is there, it's a really good contrast.
Do you know why I think people don't cook celeriac at home?
Because it's such a big ugly vegetable
and people aren't sure how to approach it.
It's huge, isn't it? And for anyone wanting to buy it at home,
you get a lot of vegetable for your buck there.
Correct. Yeah.
Celeriac might seem exotic,
but it only costs about the same as broccoli.
Hardy root vegetables grown in the UK,
such as celeriac and parsnips,
are in season for eight months of the year.
They also store well, so rarely need to be imported.
Mussels, soup, and then come back for the bread. Let's go.
Right, clean down, main courses.
The starters are served.
Ooh! Sorry for interrupting. Oh!
I have a lovely asparagus. That's me, please.
Thank you so much. Mussels are for me. Oh.
Oh! The mighty mussels. Thank you very much, indeed.
That does look very tasty, actually.
Good mussels.
Mm!
HANNAH: While the guests tuck in,
Mike and I are doing the final calculations
for the carbon footprint of each dish.
We take into account the ingredients and portion sizes of each.
Starters, then.
it's quite a range we've got here between best to worst.
Yeah, so the best starter is about
a third of the footprint of the worst ones.
Great low-carbon food, apart from...
About half of the carbon comes from the butter and cream that's in it.
But overall, a very good choice. Yeah, good choice.
But there's one really not great dish on there.
If that had been in season,
it would have been such a clear winner.
How was the soup? Um, it was virtuous.
Made me feel like I sort of hadn't made the world much worse. Yeah.
How is the asparagus, by the way?
It's really, really good. Good. You see these...
The average Brit eats the equivalent of
9kg of carbon dioxide every day.
This needs to come down to about three or four kilos per day
in order to reach our net zero goal.
So which of the starters will be the sustainable stars,
and which will be carbon catastrophes?
Well, ladies and gentlemen,
I very much hope you enjoyed the food.
Lovely. Thank you so much. We really did enjoy it.
Dr Hannah. Dr H, I call her.
She's got all your info. I do.
I do, and some surprises, I think.
These are the carbon footprints of each dish.
So the celeriac soup was the lowest.
Yes! That's just a kilo of CO2 equivalent.
Mussels, very good.
No! Shame, shame.
The asparagus. How could you?
You talk about being a vegan. OK, how could I?
Cos there was only one vegan option.
Yeah, that's how you could. Yeah, I know.
But also, I would still have ordered it.
It was a delicious starter.
I love asparagus. Um...
A 3.52 of carbon sounds minimal, doesn't it?
How much damage could it do?
It's...like a quiet belch. Yeah.
Well, you say it's not very much, Sara,
but that's 3.5 kilos of CO2 equivalent.
It's pretty weighty. Is that a lot? It's quite a lot.
HANNAH: Sara has used almost all of her daily target
of carbon in just one starter.
The reason her asparagus is so bad is that it came all the way
from Peru, 10,000km by plane.
Asparagus is rarely transported by ship
because it's considered too perishable.
So to minimise its impact, try to have it when it's in season,
early summer in Britain.
As the celeriac is in season and locally sourced,
Amol's soup has the lowest carbon footprint.
You can really keep your carbon footprint down
if you buy local vegetables and fruit.
I'm surprised that the salmon was so, so low.
Because in order to produce salmon,
you have to feed them on ground-up white fish.
So they're just eating other fish?
Matthew is right to be surprised by the salmon score.
It was only so low because the portion size was small,
just 80g.
Farmed salmon actually has one of the worst carbon footprints
of the common British fish.
And scientists are now looking at new ways to reduce its impact.
Most of the salmon we buy in the UK
comes from the sea lochs of Scotland,
where 200 fish farms hold a staggering 50 million salmon.
But to grow so many salmon, you need an awful lot of fish food.
The feed makes up 80% of the carbon footprint of farmed salmon.
Fish farmers Rory Conn and Nicholas Blackburne know all that fish food
is a pressing environmental issue.
On this site, there are 300,000 salmon.
With the size of the fish currently, we'll be feeding approximately
ten tonnes a day across all the pens.
This briefcase contains samples of the ingredients of the feed,
the particular oils and proteins which make the salmon grow best.
This is the feed that we're using here on this site.
It's a diet that's made up of 10% fishmeal.
You can see that here. As well as 10% fish oil.
The rest of the diet is principally
made up of a variety of plant raw materials.
Most of the fish elements of the feed come from conventional fishing.
Catching fish and then feeding this fish to other fish
is an inefficient way to produce food.
But the relatively high carbon footprint of salmon
could be about to change.
Dr Craig Woods works for a biotech company called Deep Branch
that's changing how the feed for fish and other animals is made.
Craig's ingenious project will harness the waste carbon dioxide
from power stations and convert it into protein.
He does this by growing up a special type of bacteria.
We pump in the carbon dioxide, which is the greenhouse gas,
but also the carbon source for our bacteria,
and we make sure that the bacteria has got the perfect conditions
for it to thrive, because we want to make as much of it as possible,
as efficiently as possible.
Because that's what's eventually going to be fed to the fish.
The growing bacteria is made up of protein,
which can then be turned into the raw material for the feed.
I'll get some of the bacteria out so we can have a look at them.
So there they are, looking happy.
This will then be put into a centrifuge,
which will concentrate up the biomass.
We then dry that and turn it into a powder form,
which then looks more like this.
And that is a finished product.
Within three years, Craig hopes to scale up his small lab process
into an industrial plant,
producing 100,000 tonnes of protein feed a year,
enough to provide two billion portions of salmon.
Now, if we were going to make the same amount of protein
on a soy plantation, then that would represent an area
three times the size of Paris.
Ultimately, if you're thinking about salmon fillets,
we would look to make a salmon fillet
with 25% less carbon footprint.
Craig's research could bring good news in the future.
For now, other forms of seafood have lower carbon footprints,
like the great British mussel.
Mussels, very good. And actually, one of the reasons why
mussels are so good, they build their shells,
they're actually capturing carbon from the atmosphere,
which is one of the reasons why it's pretty good.
Are they? That's brilliant.
I feel a little halo coming around the back of my head.
Not as big as my halo, mate. All right.
Celeriac and pear soup. But I've got a smaller head.
Mussels have a lower carbon footprint than any other seafood,
something Dr David Aldridge of Cambridge University
knows all about.
Mussels can be grown on ropes like this.
And as you can see, you get a lot of mussels on a rope
cos they sit one on top of the other.
And these ropes can be many, many metres long.
And they're just left dangling in the ocean.
The great beauty with this is that
once the mussels are out there on the ropes,
you don't need to do anything with them at all.
So unlike things like salmon farming, where you have to feed them
and you have to add chemicals to control parasites and disease,
the mussels are just left to their own devices.
And then the other great thing with mussels
is that because they have a shell, they actually come ready-packaged.
You don't need to actually package them in lots of expensive
and carbon-consuming materials before they're sent out
to the supermarkets and shops. This is perfect, then.
I mean, mussels sound like a great bit
if you're trying to reduce your carbon footprint of your food.
Absolutely.
So how much carbon dioxide equivalent
do different types of seafood produce per kilogram?
Now, right at the top, way out with a massive environmental impact,
are farmed, warm water prawns.
Now, these are the very juicy tiger prawns that are farmed in mangroves,
destroying the habitat in the process.
And while they are delicious, they also have this massive number,
25kg of CO2 equivalent for every kilo of prawns
that appears on your plate.
By contrast, down here, we've got cold water prawns.
These are the prawns around the UK, much tinier,
3.8kg of CO2 equivalent.
And I think a very good alternative, if prawns is your thing.
Over here we've got salmon and cod.
Now they're about neck and neck at 4.1 kg of CO2 equivalent
for every kilogram of cod or salmon.
Now, with salmon, about 80% of that
is the food that's required to feed them.
Cod, however, they grow up wild in the sea and are fished.
So this 4.1 kg actually is mostly down to the fuel needed
to send out the boats to go and find them.
Right down to the bottom, with just 1.4kg,
it is mussels.
One way to make sure you're making environmentally-friendly
seafood choices is to look out for blue ticks on the labels.
They're awarded by the Marine Stewardship Council, or MSC,
who assess seafoods on a variety of sustainability criteria.
Mackerel and herring are British fish with low carbon footprints.
They require less fuel to catch, as they school near the surface,
making them easier to hunt.
The guests aren't off the hook yet with their starters.
We're also scoring them on their booze.
Now, for your drinks.
Anyone want to make a guess? Wine versus beer?
I'm guessing the beer is better cos beer comes from closer.
But I could be wrong. I didn't drink, so...
The beers made me feel very virtuous.
Probably means that I'm not. Tastes quite good.
Well, um, I shall show you.
So you are right that, of course,
the wine came from much further away,
coming from Australia as opposed to Spain,
but it is about how it gets here.
But crucially, it's about the container... No.
..that it's in when it gets here. Really?
Gregg. I found this out a few years ago.
The wine that comes from Australia comes in such quantity,
whole container ships full. Oh, really?
And there's not... Delicious, delicious ships.
There's not a single bottle or glass in the whole ship.
Oh. It's all inside enormous balloons, inside containers.
And you're not spending all that fuel shipping over
all the weight of that extra glass.
So they bottle it once they arrive?
Yes. Whereas the beer from Spain is bottled in Spain
and then brought over on trucks.
So you're paying... I mean, it's not an enormous difference, but it is.
But it's still a win for us. Yeah, totally! Cheers to you!
It's worth saying it's a hell of a lot to ask of a consumer,
isn't it, that they would know not only the method of transport,
but the kind of specifics of whether it comes pre-bottled or not.
Waiters would hate you, imagine if you were asking, like,
"I would love some wine. Can you tell me how it got here?"
I think part of the reason we're not asking
is because we've just never been given these signals.
You know, when you go in a supermarket, you have to really,
really hunt for this stuff to be able to find it.
It does take some detective work.
But if your imported wine, beer or spirit says
it's been bottled in the UK on the label,
they're usually more eco friendly.
Drinks made entirely in Britain, such as local ales or cider,
tend to have an even lower carbon footprint.
If you prefer spirits, it's good news
because they generally take less carbon to produce per unit.
Now, the first course is over,
who's got the lowest carbon footprint score?
So do you want to see the leaderboard so far? Yeah.
Here we go. We all know who's way out in front here
with the worst carbon footprint so far.
So Sara there... I've decided to win the other way.
THEY LAUGH
And Desiree, I think the fact that you didn't have a drink
is the thing that really helped you there. Save your points, kids.
Save your points.
But Desiree is other winning.
With two courses to go,
there's still time for Sara to redeem herself.
Ladies and gentlemen, please have a look at your mains.
As with the starters, there's a range of carbon footprints
hidden in each dish,
but who will choose best?
For pure taste grounds, I go chicken,
but I think it's got to be the miso grilled tofu.
Yeah, I think I'm getting the tofu as well. I love miso.
Absolutely love miso.
Well, we know how bad soy is,
so we can't let ourselves off the hook too fully.
What's bad? Soy apparently.
Everything that goes into farming it. Is it?
This is what I have been told earlier today by Miss Sara Pascoe.
THEY LAUGH
And, so, do you know, are the potato dumplings vegan as well,
or just the tofu? Vegetarian, but not vegan. No. OK.
The only, the only vegan dish there is the tofu.
Well, I will choose the tofu, then! Hey!
We have tofu. Yes, please. Another tofu.
I'd like the tofu as well, please. Looks lovely.
Well, I'm going to go for the chicken. Thank you very much.
Steak, please, Gregg. Steak?! Two for tofu.
THEY LAUGH
It's the meat-eater's tofu!
So three tofus, a chicken and a steak.
I'm just going with what I desire. I'm going with what I want.
Your mains are on their way. Enjoy.
Thank you very much, Gregg. With a conscience or without.
Chef, got the mains. Three tofu, one chicken, one steak, medium rare.
Thank you, Gregg. Guys, did you get that? ALL: Yes, Chef.
Three tofu. Wow.
Many people think tofu is really boring,
yet it's the runaway favourite with our diners.
They must be hoping Mark's doing something exciting with it.
Oh, you got your blowtorch out! What are you doing, Chef?
I'm now blowtorching it. to get a bit colour on it,
and a little bit of smoky flavour.
Basically, tofu is completely and utterly bland.
I mean, it's virtually got no flavour at all, has it?
No, that's... I think you really need to add the flavour.
The next thing we did is we got some absolutely brilliant dark miso.
What is miso? So miso is a soybean paste which has been fermented.
So we get a very unique flavour.
What we're looking for is we want to over-roast the miso
so it almost burns, and then you'll get that real deep, rich flavour,
some smoky, that everything you look for in meat, you'll get there,
I hope. Before I go downstairs, serious question.
Toe-fu or tah-fu, how do you say it?
Toe-fu.
At 300g, or just over 10oz,
Nikki's sirloin is sizable, but not that uncommon.
It's cooked with butter and a side of triple cooked chips.
And Matthew's free-range chicken
is accompanied with pumpkin and truffles.
In the dining room, the main courses are served.
Thank you very much. Yeah! That looks delicious, doesn't it?
Gorgeous. Wow!
Cheers. Cheers. Cheers, everyone!
To a lower carbon footprint!
THEY LAUGH
I would only have this as a treat.
I mean, I do... I don't eat meat seven days a week.
I will always have breaks.
I mean, I grew up eating spicy food.
I feel like I know about spicy food.
That was really nice spicy food. What's it like?
You've eaten that... Incredibly spicy.
I think spiced lentil and tofu is going to be on my menu at home.
Tofu has definitely got some problems.
Yeah, with the farming, but it's so delicious.
This is beautifully flavoured.
What's the carbon footprint of raising chicken?
You've got to feed them,
you've got to put a lot of energy into feeding them.
But is it more energy-efficient than producing tofu?
Mike and I are finalising the carbon footprint of the mains.
OK, so, we put all of this in there, we have got the stats.
We've got the scores on the doors now.
OK, this is far and away the highest carbon dish
in the whole of the meal.
8.5 kilos of carbon. The carbon cherry on the top.
Now, this is the one that really threw them.
Ah, so I wonder what they expected.
So this one is the clear winner.
We're now ready to reveal the carbon footprint of each dish.
Well, ladies and gentlemen, before we show the results,
how were your mains? How did you get on?
Tofu was delicious. It was fantastic. Really loved that.
Worth all the carbon. Steak? And my steak was delicious.
And I know it's bad, I know it's bad.
OK, all right.
Who wants to guess, then, how the meals lined up against one another?
I have a sneaking feeling that the tofu was the...
The biggest? ..had the biggest.
No, I think the general consensus had been
beef, tofu, chicken. All right.
So here are the results.
Tofu is by far the lowest in terms of its carbon footprint.
Followed by potatoes,
followed by anything that's animal protein,
anything that's another living creature.
Whoa!
That's three asparaguses! That's quite a lot.
So this is 8.5kg of CO2 just for that one plate.
Now, I will tell you, this could be much worse, by the way,
because this is home-grown beef.
So this is British beef.
If you're eating imported beef,
especially from somewhere like Brazil,
where it's deforestation to house the cattle,
and they're then fed on things like soy,
which means further deforestation to grow the crop
to feed the cattle, the numbers for imported beef
would be more than three times higher than this. Wow. Wow.
So I'm not saying you should feel incredibly guilty about eating beef
instantly, eating beef is OK.
It's just maybe thinking about cutting down on
how much you eat and how often you eat it.
Actually, it might not be OK.
Ooh. Well, how do you feel now you know?
Awful, absolutely awful.
I kind of... I did think it would be the worst,
but I thought I'm going to go with what I love, what I fancy.
I didn't think it'd be like that.
Yeah, there's no way... I mean, not three times the asparagus.
..anticipating it was going to be that. No.
SARA: Cos that's the weight of my dog.
Is it? That's like a terrier.
And this chicken one's kind of interesting, actually.
So you were eating a free-range chicken today.
Actually, the carbon footprint would be slightly lower
if we'd given you an intensively farmed chicken,
because it means that the chickens aren't doing things like
walking around or... Having a lovely, fulfilled life.
But I think that's it, that, you know,
these aren't the only numbers to take into consideration.
You have to think about animal welfare
and lots of other things too.
Such as joy, pleasure, happiness, steak?
Oh, I'm kind of with you, as a carnivore,
but your own happiness at what cost?
It's certainly made me think. Yeah.
Do you eat less beef than you used to, Gregg? Yes.
And I'll eat a lot less now, I think. Really?
I don't think you have to give it up completely.
But if you had to make one sacrifice, Hannah, based on that,
you know, if people thought, "What's the one thing I can do?"
Mushrooms, forget them. Get them out of there!
Exactly, exactly! Yeah.
I think if you're going to do one thing,
it's a pretty clear message there, isn't it?
That is...a strong contender.
A key reason why beef has such a high carbon footprint
is because cows burp out methane gas.
It doesn't matter if they're pasture fed or reared indoors,
both produce significant carbon emissions.
Cows have multiple stomachs that produce the methane.
Pigs and chicken have very different digestive systems.
So how does beef compare to the other meats
in the supermarket?
Pretty surprising, these numbers,
but imported beef from deforested land,
a massive number there.
83.3kg of CO2 equivalent
just for 1kg of beef on your plate.
Beef from the UK and lamb from the UK are a much lower
carbon footprint than the imported beef.
They're bumping around at 25kg of CO2 equivalent, or 21.
Still a massive number, it should be said.
Bacon and pork more generally is a bit lower still
at 10kg of CO2 equivalent.
And then down at the bottom there you've got chicken,
both free-range and intensive.
Now, these numbers are pretty similar to one another,
but with free-range chicken having a slightly higher carbon impact.
Although, of course, when it comes to intensively farmed chicken,
there's really the issue, too, to consider of welfare.
Meat will usually say on the front of the pack or at the counter,
whether it's from Britain.
Over three quarters of all beef sold in the UK is home grown.
The meat industry employs 125,000 people across Britain.
The question was, if farmers don't raise cattle,
what are they going to do instead?
Because there are certain sorts of ground which are only suitable
for grazing animals, they're not suitable for growing grain.
And so, in a way, you're either going to let that ground
simply go fallow and do nothing with it,
or you're going to use it to produce a food
which actually is highly nutritious,
actually can be extremely healthy and taste delicious.
And it's worth saying that those who do decide to eat less beef
have to reckon with the fact that that has bad consequences
for some farmers.
So beef has a huge carbon footprint.
Are we ever going to be able to eat a guilt-free steak?
New research is exploring the ways of reducing the impact of beef.
Professor Rainer Roehe is a geneticist
at Scotland's Rural College near Edinburgh.
The pressure is enormous on agriculture
to reduce methane emissions from beef cattle,
and we have to find the best ways in order to reduce methane emissions.
Rainer wants to breed a greener cow,
so he's interested in whether some cows
naturally burp out less methane than others.
In the experiments, his team have put nearly 300 individual cows
into airtight chambers and monitored the gas they produce.
We are measuring methane for two days,
and it's a very accurate measurement of methane.
Recently he's made a breakthrough.
Here we have two cows looking the same, are from the same breed,
have been eating the same diet,
but producing largely different methane emission.
Rainer and his team started to look for the reason
behind these differences.
In order for cows to digest their food,
they have a whole load of microbes in their rumen,
part of their guts.
A microscope reveals the organisms swimming around.
It's these that break down the tough grass.
There's only one disadvantage,
the microorganisms are producing methane and we want to reduce it.
Rainer has discovered that the type of microbes in the cow
is determined by the genetics of the cow.
Selectively breeding the cattle
which have fewer of the methane making microbes
could produce a powerful solution.
Come on. Come on!
A bull can produce, per year,
semen to artificially inseminate 100,000 cows.
There you can see that we can transfer
our breeding response worldwide to reduce methane emissions.
Rainer hopes that within ten years,
methane emissions from specially bred cattle could be nearly halved.
It'll make beef a far greener choice than it is today.
But what about the tofu?
Its low carbon footprint score took the diners by surprise.
The thing about soy, of course,
which is what tofu's made from, is it does get really bad press, right?
I mean, people talk about tofu leading to big deforestation,
causing massive environmental impact.
Mostly that's because soy is used to feed animals.
Oh, I see.
And they're blaming vegans when it's cows.
Soy gets a bad rap.
I'm not going to accept that argument any more,
cos it gets shoved in your face a lot when you go, "I'm a vegan."
"Oh, do you eat soy? OK, well, goodbye Amazon."
THEY LAUGH
So 90% of soy that's grown is used for animals.
OK, wow. Wow. Much more efficient to eat the tofu.
As a rule of thumb, plant-based foods normally have
a much lower carbon footprint than meat.
Even so, scientists are looking to make vegetarian foods
even more sustainable.
A large part of the carbon footprint of crops comes from
synthetic fertilisers sprayed on fields.
They contain chemicals like ammonium
and nitrogen, which help the crops grow.
Dr Emanga Alobwede has been working on a new type of fertiliser
at the University of Sheffield.
The production of synthetic fertilisers such as ammonium,
for example, is a highly energy intensive process,
using up to 1% of global fossil fuel reserves
and also contributing up to 1% of global CO2 emissions.
Synthetic fertilisers create other problems.
Excess nitrogen can escape into nearby streams and rivers,
leading to a massive growth of unwanted algal material,
which chokes the waterways.
Basically, the nitrogen and phosphorus,
which are key elements for fertilisers,
are also key elements that the algae also require for their growth.
These polluting algal blooms inspired Emanga
to turn an environmental problem into an ingenious solution.
She's converting algae into a more ecologically friendly biofertiliser.
She isolated a species of algae naturally found in soil
and grows them up.
So this barrier actually ramps up the growth of the algae.
Water is circulated throughout the system,
and it has this unique serpentine shape,
which gives it a bigger surface area and allows
more light to be captured by the microalgae.
The algae take a week to grow.
It's then turned into a powder, which can be applied to crops.
To find out how her fertiliser stands up to the synthetic version,
Emanga uses them both on the same type of wheat.
We used spring wheat, which is a widely grown crop in the UK,
and when we added our biofertiliser,
in comparison to that complete inorganic fertiliser,
under the same conditions in a controlled environment,
we found out that the results were comparable
in terms of the amount of biomass.
So Emanga's new fertiliser
is as effective as the synthetic version.
And there's an extra benefit -
it limits nitrogen runoff into rivers.
The soil structure is improved
and the algae are also bound to the soil particles.
So because they are also less soluble,
they are less prone to being leached out.
In the near future,
Emanga hopes her bio fertiliser will be making crops
such as wheat and barley with an even lower carbon footprint.
Back at the restaurant, the score board is updated.
All right, shall we do the leaderboard?
OK, so this is now starter, drinks and main and...
Um, well. Whoa.
Oh, hi.
Ooh! So, Nikki, there you are.
I stick out a lot. Just, I mean, a bit. KO.
A bit. There's still time. KO!
THEY LAUGH There's still time. Oh, dear.
Sara, your asparagus is just clinging you on to
second place there... Yeah. ..in terms of the bad second place.
And then Matthew in third,
your main course contributing a good chunk there.
HE LAUGHS Yes.
And then, Amol, you're looking good, actually.
Looking good there, feeling very smug. Cheers. Thanks very much.
But Desiree, you are currently winning.
Should we moo-ve on? THEY LAUGH
Thanks, Gregg.
It's time for the final course.
OK, something sweet.
Yes, please. Definitely. Diners.
Would you like to have a look at your options? Yes. OK.
The disaster choice of the desserts has a footprint three times greater
than the eco-friendly winner.
Warm chocolate brownie with salted peanut ice cream.
That does look lovely. That is essentially my favourite dessert.
I'm doomed anyway, so...
Sara, and for anybody else who is interested,
the vegan dish on there is the brownie.
Oh, lovely. OK, great.
That makes my decision very easy.
So can we take your orders?
I'd love the warm chocolate brownie, please.
Well, I fancy cheese and banana and brownies. Sold.
Sara, you want a brownie? Yeah.
Desiree? Brownie. Brownie, please.
Three brownies for the girls. Yeah.
Matthew? Marshmallow. Cheese, please.
Three brownies, a marshmallow and the cheese.
Great, thank you. Enjoy.
Right, let's get this cheese finished, guys.
Comte, Cheddar, Brie and goat's cheese.
Up in the kitchen,
Mark wants to show me a trick for keeping the carbon footprint
of your summer berries down in the middle of winter.
We've got a dish we're going to do now,
which is right up your street, Gregg.
So what I've got are some stunning berries here from the summer,
which all we've done is literally freeze.
Would you rather freeze the raspberries in season
than buy ones that are imported, seriously?
Yes. You would? Yes.
Why? Carbon footprint.
And also just because I don't think there's anything better
than a real fresh raspberry when it's had the sun on it.
There's something about certain fruits grown in this country
that have that flavour. I think raspberry's one of them.
What we're going to do is just smash them up like this,
put them all in, and then we've got here just simple meringue.
Using up your egg whites,
which you maybe have kicking around the kitchen.
The berries and the coulis, nice little winter dessert.
Got spoons, yeah? Get stuck in.
MM!
Did you get the texture from the raspberries giving it the bite?
Listen, I'm the MasterChef judge, all right? You just watch on.
Can you taste the biscuit, buttery...?
HE LAUGHS
The final course is served.
Oh, wow. Geez. Lovely. Wow.
Thank you. Oh, look how cute that is! Oh, look at that.
Oh, that's like...marshmallow ice cream.
The brownie...
This lovely, soft, billowing meringue, and sort of sharp berries
underneath and a bit of a crumble. Bit of a crumbled texture, there is.
I think it's both austere and indulgent at the same time. Mm.
Oh, and sugary.
All right, now I understand that. And sharp.
Is it your favourite of all of the courses today, Matthew?
I feel it's the one I can eat with the clearest conscience.
The brownie, I can't work it out. Flour... I was thinking about that.
Flour, sugar, cocoa. I think maybe we're second worst.
I, I really hope that the cheese makes you lose the entire thing.
You go from winning to losing... Mm-hm. ..in one cheese plate.
And if you're proven right, the lesson of today is basically
the less it's got to do with animals, the better. Yeah.
Unless it's asparagus, in which case you might as well have a steak.
HANNAH: Mike and I are tossing up the scores for the final course.
I mean, there's one quite standout item on this dessert menu.
So maybe it's not such a good news story,
it's the second highest carbon of all the desserts.
They were convinced was going to be bad,
but actually the surprise choice, I think, from the dessert menu.
Now, to break the news to the guests.
Hey! Ah, how was pud? Pud good?
Oh. Delicious. Cheese good? It was fabulous.
Full of guilt, but delicious.
I found the idea of the impact of the brownie really confusing
because I feel like cocoa and sugar is going to be pretty costly
in carbon. Yeah, I would... Yeah.
But I'm hoping you'll tell me the exact opposite and go,
"Actually, they just fall from the sky." Oh, yes.
Of course, the magical brownies. Yes.
I had summer fruits and they were frozen.
So the season is perfectly acceptable.
So we reckon you're all right.
I'm feeling particularly virtuous. SARA: I'm going to hazard a guess
that I think the fruits are from abroad and flown in.
OK. Interesting guesses.
Here we go, let me show you what you've got here.
So...
..perhaps surprisingly, but delightfully,
the brownie was the lowest. Ooh! Nice.
Next low-carbon thing,
the banana also quite low,
followed by the berry sorbet.
Oh, dear.
And the cheese.
Really? Wowsers. Tragedy. Yes, cheese.
It's the same problems as with beef.
The existence of the cows creates all the trouble.
I know, but it is really tasty, isn't it?
Tasty. Very tasty.
Amol's cheese plate contained a selection of
four of our best-loved cheeses.
So we need to talk about cheese.
And I hate to break it to you,
but the carbon footprint of cheese actually isn't that much lower
than of beef and lamb.
Parmesan, there, 18.6kg of CO2 equivalent,
which is more than bacon.
Now, little bit of hope.
It does depend on the cheese that you're eating.
So these slightly softer cheeses
tend to use less milk to make the cheese.
So goat cheese, for instance, actually only uses
five litres of milk to make 1kg of goat's cheese,
which is why it's down to 6.5kg of CO2 equivalent.
Compare that to something like Cheddar,
which needs ten entire litres of milk
just to make one delicious kilogram block of Cheddar.
So when shopping, soft cheeses tend to be a better carbon bet
than hard cheeses.
Dairy free cheeses have a lower footprint
than their dairy counterparts
because they're made from vegetable oils, nuts or soy instead of milk.
The berry dish Matthew chose could easily have been a carbon disaster.
Ah, the berries, you were right, actually,
about the fact that they were frozen
and therefore not a problem eating them out of season.
Had they been fresh berries that had been flown over,
you'd be looking up roughly around the same level as the cheese.
I wouldn't have had it in that case. THEY LAUGH
The carbon footprint of frozen berries is just
3kg of CO2 per kilogram of fruit.
Fresh berries, which are flown in or grown in heated greenhouses,
produce about 14kg of carbon.
They also tend to be pricier.
And even though bananas come from the other side of the world,
they're low carbon because they travel by ship,
a very efficient form of transport.
They stop bananas ripening in transit using temperature control.
Other hardy fruits like apples can also come by ship.
But the brownie is just the king of puds in terms of carbon here.
Yes, in terms of carbon, definitely.
Only a vegan brownie cos it doesn't have the egg or butter. Yes.
So actually a normal brownie
wouldn't be as carbon efficient as that.
Just to throw a little curveball in, though,
in the brownie there was palm oil.
Yeah, I was going to say there was
something making it that decadently moist.
Just to quote Matthew, not in my house.
THEY LAUGH
There's one last sting in the tail for the diners.
Monica, could you bring that trolley in, please?
OK. Ah.
Waste, food waste.
Oh, dear.
Food waste. Yeah, I was thinking about that, actually,
cos I was terrible for that today.
This is what was left over from this dinner party.
Yeah. Hm. Oh, dear.
Let me tell you something.
We, as a nation, throw away
30% of the food we buy.
Almost a third of the food we buy.
Our own household food waste...
..makes up a whopping 70%...
..of all food waste.
If you want to make an impact
and have a cheeky piece of beef every now and again,
cut down on your waste.
Yeah. AMOL: That is completely unforgivable, isn't it?
It's...a real eye opener, isn't it?
In my defence, I probably wouldn't have cooked such a...
That's what I'm saying. ..hoofer of a steak.
It's too late. It's too late. I promise I wouldn't...
At home you can turn that into something else the next day.
SARA: Pop it in the fridge in some Tupperware if... Yeah.
..you hadn't finished and then you'd have eaten it.
Make steak tacos, yeah.
HANNAH: I do think though, Nikki, that this isn't about, you know,
your plate isn't even about this meal tonight.
It's about the things that all of us are doing all the time
in our homes without even thinking about it.
You know, a loaf of bread goes off in the cupboard,
just chuck it in the bin.
Nearly 60% of our food waste ends up in landfill sites or incinerators.
Any time we waste food, then all the carbon footprint
of producing that food has been completely in vain.
And on top of that, if we do the wrong thing with the waste,
like put it into a landfill site,
especially not a very well-managed one
where a whole load of methane is allowed
to escape into the atmosphere...
It's a double whammy. It's a double whammy.
Sometimes people say, "Well, it's OK,
"I haven't really wasted it cos I fed it to the dog."
Actually, we did some research on this.
The benefits of doing that for most foods is not that great.
There's only one thing that needs to happen to any human edible food,
is it needs to be eaten by humans.
So be a bit more careful about what food you buy
and plan better. Just waste food less.
Yeah, totally. And what's not to like? You know, it saves money,
it saves everything.
We can now reveal the grand totals.
Which of our diners will be crowned Carbon Champion
and who is Footprint Loser?
OK, time for the final scores...let's see.
Who thinks that they're out in front instantly?
I feel like I am. I think Desiree's fine. Desiree.
Pretty certain I am. I think I am.
Started with not drinking and making bad decisions, kids!
A bit of smugness in the corner there, love.
Been waiting all day for the smugness.
OK, all right. Here we go.
These are the final scores.
So, no surprise, Nikki, I'm afraid that steak
really held you back. Way out there.
Aw... And Sara, that's, I mean,
that's still really your starter. Asparagus. Yeah. Wow.
Asparagus hangover you're looking at. Yeah.
And... Matthew's got a nice mixed bag.
At least Matthew's kind of equally as bad. Yeah!
He's been quite consistent. Yeah.
But by quite a long way, Desiree,
you smashed it this evening.
THEY CLAP
As our unique meal draws to a close,
we've learned it's all too easy to use up an entire day's carbon target
in just one dish.
I'm definitely going to think about,
"Do I actually really want that steak,"
which is usually in a nice ciabatta with a bit of sliced avocado.
So, yeah, I am going to think a lot differently about red meat.
It's not only meats we need to think about.
I hereby resolve to eat less cheese
after I finish that stuff on that plate.
And even seemingly innocent vegetables can catch us out.
So I obviously need to become more aware of like
seasonal fruits and vegetables,
it's something I need to raise my awareness of.
Scientists such as Mike Berners-Lee are arguing for
a food-labelling traffic light system
that warns us about the carbon footprint of foods.
But for now, it's up to us to judge for ourselves.
Adding one more ethical and environmental consideration
when we're shopping for our food.
Getting to the truth behind the environmental impact of our food
is anything but simple.
But if we all think a bit more carefully
about the food choices we make,
there are ways we can still eat fabulous food
that doesn't cost the Earth.