Les détaillants doivent aider les consommateurs à « manger écologique »[en] 

The production, packaging and transport of food can be very energy intensive, resulting in carbon emissions and thus contributing to global warming. 

According to a Commission report on environmental impact of products (EIPRO ), published in 2006, food and drink are responsible for between 20 and 30% of the environmental impact of consumption and much of this is said to be due to meat and dairy products. 

Results of a recent Japanese study  on the 'life-cycle' of a standard beef cow, including feed production and transport, animal management and the biological activity of the animal, showed that eating one kilogram of beef produces more greenhouse gas emissions than driving for three hours while leaving the lights on at home.

The European Commission's annual Green Week event dedicated a session to sustainable eating on 4 June. The aim was to highlight how consumers, policymakers, retailers and civil society can contribute to a better environment by adopting sustainable food consumption habits. 

The session particularly highlighted UK-based research and initiatives on the subject. Bronwen Jones from the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said the UK is currently involved in developing a way to measure different food products' carbon content. 

The first standard should be ready this autumn and could potentially lead the way towards a consumer label indicating the carbon footprint of each product. This includes transport emissions or the energy and water needed to produce the products.

Within two years, the UK government hopes to have "a sound evidence base" to bring the issue forward at policymaking level and introduce it in public communications.

The speakers of the session acknowledged that even if consumers are aware of the environmental impact of their food consumption and would like to change their behaviour, they are not always financially able to do so, and find 'green eating' otherwise complicated. In this regard, the speakers particularly highlighted the role of retailers in helping consumers to make sustainable choices.

"Retailers have a key role as gatekeepers as they mediate the nutrition demands of consumers and the supply of thousands of businesses," said Bronwen Jones  of Defra's Food Chain Programme. She also argued that Defra research has shown that "benefits of locally produced food are widely over-claimed" and that the main cost of transporting food results from "road accidents and congestion". 

Therefore, she argued, tomatoes imported to the UK from Spain can be lower carbon than tomatoes produced in Britain, because tomatoe production at northern latitudes is more energy intensive. However, "it is not that clear-cut if we take into account the water use and stress," she acknowledged.

But she added that "you should not assume that the closer a produce comes from, the more sustainable it is," saying the real waste story related to food is the food wasted. "We throw away about a third of the food we buy," she said, describing throwing away meat and dairy products as "the ultimate sin".

"Consumers are often locked into unsustainable consumption patterns due to either economic or institutional constraints, habits or for simple ignorance," said Lucy Yates, speaking on behalf of Consumers International (CI), a global consumer group. Therefore, "consumers want retailers to do more," she said. 

Yates calls this 'choice-editing', which consists of retailers taking the most environment-damaging products off their shelves or improving standards of all products. Greengrocers would namely sell seasonal products, use recycled packaging materials and sell sustainably produced fish and farming products. 

"Retailers must set challenging targets on green issues," concluded Yates. 

Michael Scannel from the Commission's Health and Consumer Protection directorate agreed that helping consumers to make sustainable food choices "is a major challenge for retailers," who could emerge as 'benchmarkers' in this regard and eventually take the lead, at a time when food production's contribution to CO2 emissions is huge and the demand for food is increasing.

Ash Amirahmadi, trading director at ARLA Foods, a major dairy company agreed that retailers play a key role in helping consumers to make sustainable choices. According to ARLA consumer research, environment is "on consumers' radar" but "not on top of their worries". Furthermore, consumers believe that "green choices are expensive and make life complicated", he added.

"Consumers are bombarded with information and just want us [retailers] to make the right thing," concluded Amirahmadi.