The ethics of eating out

Restaurants, cafes and canteens are providing us with more environmental information about the food they serve. This is good news – but not necessarily for the reasons you might think, finds David Burrows

A report in April, by technology company Nutritics and consultancy CGA by NIQ, showed 34 per cent of us are prepared to spend more than usual in hospitality venues with strong sustainability credentials. However, we seem to find it tricky to know who is offering us sustainable meals and who isn’t. We want better communication, and are demanding more guidance from the pubs, bars, cafés, and restaurants to enable us to make more environmentally friendly choices, according to the report.

Indeed, nearly half (47%) of respondents said they want to see carbon footprints on menus, and 41 per cent claimed it would influence their order. These labels can make a difference, notes Georgina Camfield, head of ESG at catering firm Aramark UK & global offshore, which serves up food in many schools, hospitals and universities. “Although I would say the impact is gradual,” which is only natural when looking at behaviour change: it’s not a “flick of a switch scenario,” she adds.

Carbon labels: a sign of the times

The concept of carbon labels is arguably gaining more traction in foodservice – everything from university cafés and office canteens to fast food chains and high-end restaurants and hotels – than it is in grocery. A few of the well-known names that have carbon footprints on their menus (or have recently trialled them) include Just Eat, Wahaca, Benugo, Peach Pubs, Costa, and Ask Italian. 

Sporting events including the Six Nations, the FA Cup Final and the Cheltenham Gold Cup, last year provided fans with carbon footprint information about the food and drink they could buy. Add to that the work being done by big caterers like Aramark and there is a feeling that this could actually become a mainstream movement. 

Many caterers are doing some great work to empower customers to make informed, sustainable choices,” says Camfield. “Sustainability may be a more significant factor in [our] supermarket choices [but] dining settings have the potential to better integrate sustainable options into the decision-making process. In catering we can sometimes fit somewhere in the middle: we can be the regular place of eating for many customers who may become familiar with the offer and labelling they are seeing, but may not spend as much time browsing a menu and the information on it as someone in a restaurant setting.”  

Aramark introduced carbon labelling in order to provide transparency about the environmental impact of its meals, so diners can make more informed decisions. The labels were also explained clearly (which is really important given that these carbon footprints are still only a tiny portion of the food and drink we buy). 

However, Camfield says she is yet to see whether the labelling is influencing what people buy. “In one trial site we did see an increase in purchases of lower carbon options following the launch (although it was minimal),” she explains. A classic case of people’s words not followed up by their actions, perhaps. 

Indeed, the notion that a carbon label on everything would, almost overnight, nudge us all towards eating more sustainably is fanciful. Restaurants and pubs also have to walk a fine line: people are out to enjoy their meal so they might not want to be preached to about the planet. As Carolyn Lum, sustainability manager at Mexican restaurant chain Wahaca explains: “Eating out in the restaurant setting is a treat, not the everyday. When people are indulging, the greenhouse gas emissions are likely lower down their hierarchy of influences on decision making.”

Red light, green label

In one piece of research I was involved with, we asked people what they’d like to see on a carbon label. The most popular option was for some type of colour-coded label (33%) – which was perhaps unsurprising given familiarity with traffic light labels for nutritional content. But some foodservice companies take umbrage with such an approach: a red score on certain dishes (notably red meat) could make people feel guilty when they are supposed to be out enjoying a special meal. 

A 12oz sirloin steak at Peach Pubs for example comes with a footprint of 13.8kgCO2e – or three times the amount of carbon that the World Resources Institute estimates to be the recommended daily allowance of carbon per meal in Europe (3.8kgCO2e). The dirty vegan burger has a much daintier footprint (0.9kgCo2e) and so too does the free-range chicken schnitzel (2.1kgCO2e) and daily fish options (1.1kgCO2e). “It’s about finding a balance between giving customers the information if they want it, without pushing it in people’s face,” the chain told me.

Some pubs have therefore stuck with numbers or black and white graphics. Whether this defeats the object – to flag the footprints clearly – is not clear. And even if a simple label can persuade some consumers to bypass beef, those other lower-carbon choices also come with baggage: think pollution from poultry or over-fishing for example, or the processing involved in plant-based meat alternatives. Vegetarian options are not necessarily climate-friendly either – particularly if they contain dairy (cows are high emitters of methane, the short-lived but very powerful greenhouse gas).

All this can serve to confuse us when trying to unpick a sustainable menu choice (and complicated attempts to produce a holistic ecolabel that would wrap everything from animal welfare and fair pay to carbon and biodiversity impact into one sticker). That doesn’t mean it is fruitless, though, with the likes of Lum and Camfield convinced that their work is helping to plant the seed in consumers’ minds that food comes with an environmental impact.

According to WWF, agriculture and land use are responsible for 30 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions and almost 60 per cent of biodiversity loss. Understanding and appreciation of these links is improving, in part thanks to the information being provided when we eat out. Indeed, it’s at these times when we may well have more time to digest the carbon footprint of a dish and what it means (compared to the rush of a weekly shop in a busy supermarket).

Spill the beans

When Imperial College looked at Wahaca’s labelling scheme there was a “reassuring” discovery, according to Lum: they found that there was ‘spillover’ from seeing the climate impact of food choices in the restaurant setting, to thinking about the climate impact of food choices outside of the restaurant environment. 

Recent research by academics at the Universities of Bath and Oxford showed that we are all actually becoming more ‘carbon capable’ – this equates to the knowledge, skills and motivation necessary to reduce an individual’s carbon footprint. We are talking about climate change more, and there have been decent incremental changes in everyday habits, such as switching off lights and recycling, notes Sam Hampton from the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford. The proportion of people who report regularly buying organic, locally produced and in-season food also increased from 12.6 per cent to 19.2 per cent between 2008 and 2022, Hampton explained in a piece for The Conversation.

But this isn’t enough. “If we are serious about making the UK more carbon capable, we need to see more substantive measures, such as removing barriers to make low-carbon life choices easy, affordable and attractive,” he added.

The nudges – such as positioning low-carbon or plant-based dishes prominently on menus and framing them as special recommendations, such as Aramark’s ‘A of the day’ for a low carbon dish – are therefore just the start. The planting of the seed, as Camfield puts it, which will grow into wider uptake of sustainable choices, like classic recipes with less and better meat, or new entirely plant-based meals.

Whether or not we take our ethics with us when we eat out, may ultimately matter less than we think. That’s because the environmental data companies are collecting goes beyond a carbon footprint served alongside our steak, or sausage and mash. The big picture is less about consumer decision-making, and more about the choices made by restaurant groups, caterers, and chefs in the kitchens – with a view to designing low carbon menus that become the norm… providing sustainable food choices as the status quo, each and every time we choose to eat out.  

2 Comments

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  1. I enjoyed reading your discussion of the complexities involved. I have one comment about catering for those who wish to avoid animal products. There’s too much provision of highly-processed meat alternatives which many people don’t actually want. Sometimes the only plant-based dish on a menu is fake sausages or burgers. It’s like an afterthought – that vegan box has been ticked. It generally gets worse the further you get from cities and, particularly London, which has plenty of good eateries providing plant-based meals.
    Better to provide good dishes with whole food protein sources such as pulses. There is a wealth of tasty vegan recipes available. Caterers, please think outside the box.

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  2. I can totally agree with Sylvia’s comment below. I think the above article is wide-ranging and mostly well thought out. It’s short enough to catch the attention without being so long as to put the reader off. As to whether the dream of reducing the carbon picture of the menus and foods used in their production vis a vis the enjoyment expected of eating out wherever exotic ideas can be experienced at locations probably many miles away from home and the exxtra co2 that will use meets that dream – well that could produce lengthy debates. Perhaps it would just be easier to somehow reduce the amount of wastage at all levels in the food production industry. If the oft quoted figure of 30% of all food is wasted then this would appear to be a much easier target to aim at. And there are so places where the attack on this could start. However, overall if the message is transmitted at all levels and all over the place again, again, and again, then at least some of it must stick.

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