Singapore's Food Problem: Carbon Footprint Of A Food Paradise | Climate Change: A Wicked Problem

[Music] it's already happening in some parts of the world and some scientists say that if we continue to produce greenhouse gases at this rate we could see an increase in insect pests global warming not only causes a rise in the number of pests but also increases their appetite [Applause] as it is in one day a swarm of locusts the size of tampanese and changi can destroy enough food crops to feed everyone in singapore 10 times over currently 10 to 15 percent of our global crop production is lost to pests but each additional degree of temperature increase could cause global yields to drop by a further 10 to 25 percent but while our food supply may be threatened by climate change our current diets are contributing to it from raising animals growing vegetables from processing to shipping if you eat you're part of the food system that accounts for up to a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions isn't it about time we reduce this figure and what if this could be part of the solution i think this is the hardest episode i'm going to do because i'm confronting something that's so central to life here in singapore in this series i've revealed how our plastic addiction is causing a strain on the environment that's disgusting i was just aware of all the plastic and all the trash and our need for more and more and more power is forcing us to look for alternative sources that aren't always readily available and how much solar we generate in singapore still very small we will always be limited in space unfortunately plastic and energy are they the only culprits that pop into your mind when you think about climate change perhaps you've never considered the impact of this [Music] what we eat [Music] we are a land of incredible food we go everywhere just to eat so so much of our food dictates you know our whole lifestyle in a way people travel from far and wide to eat here singapore is the best food i think very vibrant and very exciting the world acknowledges us for it singapore's hockey culture is now on the unesco intangible cultural heritage list we greet each other with it subtitle but did you know that globally our food systems have higher carbon emissions than the entire transport sector perhaps that's why the very first chapter of this essay collection about climate change in singapore is about our delicious chili crab i'm meeting xiaoyun the author of the essay eating chili crab in the anthropocene to find out why she chose to write about our favorite crustacean hi how are you how are you doing good good so i was looking at your essay in this book and now we're literally eating chili crab right i love seafood sifu is a big part of singaporean culture too i don't know is this going to get messy yeah i mean you're wearing so this is messy as well right the the subject this issue yeah so i thought that food was actually a very easy segue for most singaporeans into the topic of climate change so how much of a climate change issue then is chili crab this crab is 1.5 kg per kg is like 4.86 kilograms of carbon emissions we import about like 5 500 crabs in a day i think because of how the scale of his marketing as a tool for like attracting tourists to come to singapore and you know marketing our sense of like heritage and culture maybe it's not that sustainable right singapore imported 55.9 million us dollars worth of crabs in 2019 making us the world's largest net importer of fresh and chilled crabs by dollar value per capita especially when it's affected by monsoons crab supplies actually like face crunches of up to 30 i mean definitely the weather exacerbates this problem but also that our demand for this food has outpaced its ability to reproduce itself but surely that must be a global problem associated with increased consumption everywhere it's a global problem but like many things right we can't just like exonerate ourselves because as you know we are diversifying our import sources so our demand and also like global demand for these seafoods is actually affecting mangrove habitats and the mangrove forest has to be cleared from places like indonesia philippines india sri lanka and as far as the east coast of africa so that's a direct link because i've learned earlier in this series about how mangroves serve an important role in sucking carbon out of the atmosphere [Music] so do you think we as singaporeans need to change our eating habits for the sake of climate change i think it begins with realizing that cultural practices such as eating certain foods is no longer aligned with how we want to be because singapore is saying how we want to increase our climate ambition right so part of that is like eating more sustainably so your food choices does help you reduce your carbon footprint going plant-based supporting local farms would actually really reduce your carbon footprint do you think singaporeans are ready for this and keen for this i mean food is a central part of our identity isn't it i think we need to pursue singaporeans yes what do you think it will take to persuade them i think that's why we need to make it not just a an environmental issue i know we're in an episode about climate change but it's not just climate change you know and it's about like health health reasons being more plant-based or eating less red meat yeah so it's not purely about climate change though yeah it's a messy issue yeah i definitely think that okay okay we should just stop eating who am i kidding i don't just love my chili crab i love all food i'm sure most of us feel the same way but xiaoyon says that what we eat matters and if singapore doesn't take steps to reduce the greenhouse gases in relation to what we eat by 2030 the total emissions from the sector will increase by 19 percent this is according to a research team from a star after finding that most food-related climate studies were done about the us and europe they decided it would be remiss not to conduct one on our foodie nation dr john's team picked 13 of our favorite food items and used what's called a life cycle analysis to carefully calculate emissions from every stage of their production it took his team five months to do the math and now he's asked to meet me here and what did you find beef is the major culprit it's equivalent to 150 hours of leaving your 100 watt light bulb turned on at home this piece of beef yes just 250 grams that's about six kilograms of carbon emissions for this piece of beef my goodness so how does this compare with the other meats let's say i substitute my 250 grams of beef for chicken what effect would i have for the chicken is about 21 hours and 30 minutes that's about one-sixth of the effect yes that's right so 250 grams of chicken generates 875 grams of carbon emissions and then something a little bit surprising was a fish fish is a major culprit it's number four in the list partly also because we do import a lot of fish and one of the very carbon intensive fish is actually the salmon that we air fly from norway the carbon mouse that is added to flying the fish increases the carbon intensity i see local fish farms produce only nine percent of the fish we eat everything else is imported per ton kilometer air transport is nine times more carbon intensive than land transport and 50 times more so than sea transport i want to find out if people in singapore know the carbon impact of what we eat so i've got a series of foods here and i was gonna ask you to arrange them in order which do you think has the highest amount of carbon footprint which is the lowest would you give me a hint just take a guess so what should be at the top okay the beef all right the beets going all the way to the top you're very confident about this because meat's probably easily time to be transported faster so in general i think it's meat like mutton pork as well i think so i think beef goes high for the most part people know that red meats were the most carbon intensive when it came to emissions per kilogram where do you want the rice the rice uh rice that's the question near the vegetables yes yeah you're good you're good and i just feel like the vegetables and the rice should be less i think than the vegetables to me to me that seems about right so when it comes to carbon emissions by weight the order goes like this with the highest being beef followed by mutton pork fish duck leafy vegetables and fruits were the lowest then we decided to throw in a little twist and ask people to rank the foods based on emissions generated from the total consumption of each food item in singapore because what matters isn't just emissions by weight of food produced but emissions from the total amount we consume in the country so if i'm going to ask you then rearrange it on the basis of not just about the carbon footprint per food but also taking into account how much we eat would you have the same list or would you change it i wouldn't change it as much so you wouldn't change the order at all now uh all right right all the way to the left i think the rice can come up a bit right how fast you should rise you could face fish i guess normally rice over eggs why is that you think we eat more rice and eggs yeah because from what i've seen a lot of people eat rice didn't use my mouth okay i would say rice probably moved here to work maybe somewhere around here just an eggs as well uh it's gonna be somewhere here yeah chicken yeah about here like that [Music] but wait wait wait now then when you think about what we eat oh wait john go for it based on the consumption so our diet right we actually consume a lot of pork this makes it go all the way to the top it's second which is quite surprising rice eating rice eating rice so we eat a lot of chicken it goes up so we eat quite a lot of fish as well so that surprised me when i found out that actually fish has a significant cover for bread so beef actually goes all the way to the fifth spot after beef is eggs okay so quite a different story if you look at the emissions by total consumption in singapore beef is no longer at the top instead pork takes the dubious honor rice surprisingly comes in second followed by chicken fish then beef in fifth position i'm quite surprised especially with the rice rice cultivation is a significant source of greenhouse gases apart from the burning of rice residues such as straws and husks fertilizers in rice production systems could promote the release of nitrous oxide a potent greenhouse gas i mean there are many good reasons to eat a little bit less rice but this is yet another one yes precisely if i want to be a consumer that's conscious about climate change i'm a bit conflicted you know should i be eating more beef or should i be eating more pork on a per kilo basis the carbon intensity of beef is significantly higher than the pork so if it's just a one for one substitution you're just going to make the whole situation worse actually the best way to go is eat more of the vegetables i see i see in singapore our pork consumption accounts for 28 of our food-related greenhouse gas emissions because we eat so much of it 115 252 tons of it per year to be precise while all imported food generates emissions from processing and transport to singapore pigs like all livestock produce manure which eventually leads to emissions of nitrous oxide it comes from the treatment and storage of the manure that said by kilogram pigs aren't the greatest source of greenhouse gases i'm in the company of something that's a big contributor to climate change animals like cows and goats need management of their waste and housing too but they produce most of their greenhouse gas emissions in quite a different way as a doctor i've had to study human anatomy quite closely but today i'm going to try to explain the link between these animals anatomy and their greenhouse gas emissions a cow is a ruminant animal like goats sheep and deer of all the livestock ruminants released the most methane a noxious greenhouse gas why is the cow so good at producing something so bad [Music] ruminants unlike us live on a diet of plants that are hard to digest they rely on microbes in their stomach called methanogens and these break down their food releasing methane in the process this greenhouse gas collects in their gut they release this gas through both their front and back ends burping and flatulence but primarily through burping so there you have it these cows heating up our planet one burp at a time one cow can produce anything between 250 to 500 liters of methane a day if carbon dioxide with a thickness of an average blanket imagine methane as a blanket this thick methane is a greenhouse gas that has 86 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide nitrous oxide which we spoke about earlier is another greenhouse gas and it has 310 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide the only good news is that methane and nitrous oxide remain in our atmosphere for a much shorter time and there's much less of them than carbon dioxide but while our consumption of red meat like beef pork and mutton is directly contributing to climate change it's not just meat and methane we have to worry about earlier john from a star suggested that we should be eating more plant-based products like vegetables and fruit and less meat but i'm meeting someone who believes that food's impact on the climate isn't as straightforward as meat and methane you get the hipster version i get the traditional singaporean meal okay okay tell me about the foods that we have in front of us avocado largely produced in mexico you use a lot of water water usage can be associated with energy utilization as well you pop water that uses energy right you have to filter water that uses energy as well there's a lot of fertilizers as well which we all know fertilizers of course for the most part essentially from fossil fuels i thought you had the bad guy plate and i had the good guys plate but you're confusing me now some of this stuff is bad for the environment yes yeah quinoa is associated with issues of deforestation tell me my coffee is okay tell me tell me i can drink my coffee guilt-free coffee can be quite high greenhouse gas [Music] because again the land use implications of this depending on where you get your coffee mass production of quinoa and coffee requires a lot of land which in some parts of the world has resulted in deforestation and land degradation both of which reduce the land's ability to store carbon so there's a there's a movement to push vegetarianism and veganism as a way of dealing with climate change right it's not that simple of course right certain food products are associated with land use changes that are associated with greater greenhouse gas emissions like for example cutting down a forest we have to kind of take note that there are potentially environmental impacts associated with increase in demand of particular plant products as well and if we're not careful in how we're going to meet those demand then we could very well end up say with a situation where you know like for instance like we have an overexpansion of plantations like palm oil which of course we know have significant greenhouse gas implications right [Music] as global demand for food rises the amount of land needed to grow plants and rear animals often requires us to do this deforestation is the permanent removal of trees to use the land for something else trees capture carbon so removing them not only prevents future carbon capture it also releases stored carbon into the air as carbon dioxide to date total deforestation accounts for up to 20 percent of annual global greenhouse gas emissions how much of it is going on in our own backyard i'm going to meet someone who's crunched the numbers for the last five years so within southeast asia we clear about three million hectares of land per year mainly for food production and is this a number growing this is doubled since the early 2000s and this has turned southeast asia from a major store of carbon to an emitter of carbons so our sort of role in the global carbon cycle has changed as a result of this deforestation correct why is the deforestation getting worse so it's due to many reasons one of the major reason is palm oil production things like potato chips biscuits sweets gummy bears for example those all use pamela so palm oil is a major driver of deforestation within malaysia and indonesia which is a large land area within southeast asia palm oil is found in almost everything we eat from pizza dough to chocolate and even margarine the other food products like rice production for example yeah that can cause deforestation as well so every year almost 3 million hectares of forests are removed in southeast asia mostly for agriculture roughly double of what it was 20 years ago i wonder if we know how much land this really is given that we spend much of our time in indoor environments like this i devised a little experiment to find out imagine that's an area of forest how often do you think we lose an area this size [Music] like yali yearly i know every year every year it's much less than a year let me tell you you think about every day much less than that it happens much much faster 30 minutes maybe on a per minute basis 10 seconds 10 five seconds five seconds so every five seconds you think we lose a patch of force this size yes one second one second what if i tell you that you're very wrong it's much faster than that [Music] it's a second we are losing 20 times this amount of four oh just a lot it's a bit scary to be very honest i know that it was drastically losing away but i didn't know that it was this much yeah i feel kind of like short and sad i think we shouldn't like destroy the nature like this it should be stopped yeah it should be stopped but it's being done for our food shouldn't there be alternatives imagine that in one second we're losing more than 20 times this amount of forest in southeast asia well we can't undo all the damage but perhaps there's something i can do this weekend to offset it a bit but first i've got to do some calculations i'm calculating how many trees i'd need to plant to offset the average carbon footprint of one person's food intake in singapore our carbon footprint just from food is 954 kilograms per person we are a country of almost 6 million based on this number depending on the tree and how long we let it grow i've come up with a few numbers time to find out what the right one is singapore intends to plant 1 million trees over the next 10 years one of the reasons to combat climate change because trees have tremendous potential to suck the carbon from the atmosphere [Music] adrian from the national parks board is going to plant some of these trees i want to be a part of it the giant soup i think we'll just dig over here okay yeah and we need to really loosen the base because we want the roots to be able to puncture that base very fast and try to get water as soon as possible yeah so we have to keep the integrity of the root ball now we've got to slowly shift it in tell me how the tree's captured okay so you've got the leaves here they're green which means they have chlorophyll and so with sunlight water is going to go through photosynthesis right so the carbon capture is really taking the carbon dioxide straight out of the air yes through the process of photosynthesis yes do different trees capture carbon at different rates yes they do um so what we are planting here are the barrel cups so they are in a way hard wood trees because they have a high density of wood so they store more carbon than let's say uh a temperate tree uh in a temperate tree uh it has the dormancy during winter but tropical rain forestry don't doesn't have that so the tropical rainforest capture carbon all year round at a similar rate precisely so does the rate of carbon capture for a tree change over its lifetime yes it does um so um the good thing about planting a tree right is that it's young and so it's vigorously capturing carbon you know through photosynthesis it wants to grow it's basically like adolescent so planting is happening is very good so it grows very fast to the point where it becomes a big tree then it becomes a carbon storage bank right then it's still sequestering some carbon but it's not growing as fast so that carbon capture is a bit slower point of maturity how many trees do we need to plant to offset our footprint from food um we know that it's 954 kilograms per year per person right so in over 10 years about 9540 kilograms of carbon dioxide per person but at the end of 10 years the tree is still capturing carbon and increasing the carbon that's right so typically a tree will grow it will put on girth right and then at some point it will stabilize and if you take it to be at about maybe 50 years on average where it really stabilizes then you would need to only plant eight trees actually if i plant eight trees that will capture my carbon footprint from food for 50 years that's right but even then eight trees i mean for everyone in singapore that's like what 45 million there are currently about 7 million trees in singapore plus the 1 million trees that we are aiming to plant that's another 37 million more trees we need also this scenario assumes that our population doesn't grow and that we allow the trees to fully mature for 50 years do we really have enough land for 45 million singapore is small right obviously there's a limit to how much we can plant definitely but we try our best are there other limits to planting trees i've heard of you know stories where people have such ambitious targets right and what happens is that the care for the tree isn't calculated in and we do a lot of tree management as well you know along the trails you see here our staff are actually going in to inspect all the trees so i mean you have to factor in this sort of things that may limit the number of trees you plant so adrian and i planted three trees in about half an hour it's sweaty work but not impossible it's not hard actually it's just physical but do we have enough space for 45 million trees we have to do this it will capture carbon and it will have a lot of other benefits but it's not going to be enough to offset our total carbon footprint let alone the footprint that we have from consuming food well we're already reaping what we sow it's a vicious cycle our food production accelerates climate change which in turn hurts the availability of food paul tang co-authored the report warning us about this climate change expresses itself in the short term especially for example truly what we call the unexpected severe weather events especially in southeast asia typhoons are a classical example but the other symptoms of the immediate effects are things like monsoons being delayed extra rainstorms drought periods even uneven temperature so all those affect agriculture and then there's also the ocean temperature ocean acidification you know fish that we all love to eat are very very affected by temperature warming and sea level rise when sea temperatures rise oxygen levels in the oceans are affected and fish tend to migrate to cooler regions and in the southeast asian region our fish populations decline so other examples of a weather impact on a particular food that we like to enjoy here in singapore certainly i think rice is the best example because we all have to eat rice and most of our rice is imported from basically three main countries vietnam thailand and india most of indian rice is what we call rain fat rice so very dependent on the onset of the monsoon if the monsoon is delayed planting is delayed and there can be tremendous impact on how much they harvest in the end flooding is also a serious issue in many parts of india but also in let's say vietnam and thailand and flooding can cause losses you know anywhere up to five to ten percent of the entire crop can be wiped out yeah with sudden rain storms and heavy rain itself but are consumers in other countries starting to be affected by these problems the short answer is yes they are i think we see shortages of major staples philippines for example uh indonesia with much bigger populations and also where the affordability is not as high as singapore but the longer term is what we worry about okay let's say beyond you know 20 30 because if we do nothing you know in terms of global climate change we're going to see more and more frequent unexpected weather events so in the mid to long term yes we need to be very concerned in fact we import 90 percent of our food inevitably we're affected by the weather in other countries and we don't have to wait until 2030 to see the effect it has on our food supply when i embarked on this series i commissioned one of the largest and most extensive surveys in singapore on climate change we wanted to know if people in singapore understand the impact of what we eat on the climate we found that only seven percent of us said the environment was our top priority when it comes to choosing food but 38 of us prioritized food prices [Music] well the thing is it's all linked i'm going to meet the man who watches food prices like a hawk this one is uh is biome it's a spinach very popular as you know last year it was about a dollar for this particular bundle now it's a dollar twenty which is actually a twenty percent increase if you look at it that way and is that price rise linked to climate change if you look at what has been going on in malaysia there's been flood and rain over the whole of december till january so that is probably causing a significant disruption both in the production and the transportation of vegetables like these green leafy vegetables which are getting too much water are there other examples so apart from the spinach yes absolutely from the usa this is probably coming from florida the temperature that you see out there is quite warm with this one temperature and with growth of other sort of insects and what they are doing is it's actually moving to freeze to trees and destroying a lot of these orange crops so you can see the prices here it's five pieces for eight dollars that you see out here oranges have gone up by 7.5 percent on an average every year i see so if you could invest in oranges that would be a great investment that's caught over there that's card right there okay can i check the price of the cod how much the kg of cod is 80 so what's happening to the prices of cod so cot prices have been going up close to five percent a year over the last ten years i see that's quite significant but how confident are you that the price rises because of climate change absolutely so in the north sea because the temperature is increasing the production actually goes down remember these are colder climates they are more used to colder climates the production disruption means that automatically the prices will go up so there's just less fish absolutely so climate change can affect so many different types of foods absolutely what will happen this is my honest belief going forward climate change actually impacts food prices tremendously you will see that most of the population where food forms a very significant part of their budget they will have to change their food habits whether it's beet and fish or vegetables and grain our food prices are already affected by climate change we can try to produce food more sustainably but there's a limit to how we control production overseas and how much we do locally we aren't quite there yet so it seems like we have to look at eating more sustainably a group of scientists came up with a universal guideline for how to eat to sustain a healthy planet in a climate changed future a pretty specific guideline their recommended intake of red meat per day was up to 14 grams and according to the singapore food agency's 2019 figures we're currently eating more than five times that we're also eating almost three times their recommended amount of poultry and seafood when asked if they were willing to reduce their meat and dairy intake 56 percent of our survey respondents already have or are willing to do so [Music] as is alicia chan the executive chef of a cooked food and grocery store in singapore she definitely knows her way around the kitchen having cooked in top ones all over the world even at my first few jobs in the kitchen i was kind of horrified about the amount of waste that a lot of kitchens go through like we would import fish from europe and we would fillet them but we would throw away the bones and like the carbon footprint on that fish for you to throw away the bones and not do something with it just doesn't do justice to the fish so stuff like zero waste and sustainability have always been something that i've been quite passionate about i am getting her to take her sustainability journey even further and so she's embarking on the climate diet for a week [Music] if the whole world switched to the climate diet we could reduce food related carbon emissions by almost half equivalent to taking more than two-thirds of all cars off the road for a year but look at this you'd need to whip out a calculator along with your cutlery for this not really feasible for someone like alicia i would say at present my current diet is whatever is convenient i don't really have the headspace to plan my meals [Music] to help her out we found a team of technologists to automate as much of it as possible better.sg is a non-profit organization that creates tech products for good they've gathered a team of 20 just to work on this how to make it easier for her it's we had it broken down into just categories and ingredients and sean the development team actually came up with the generic list of ingredients that a normal user can eat on top of the data that we have from climate diet i think to make it easier it's to just make it intuitive for them and it starts to become like a habit where she enters every day sounds good the team has created a mobile app called climate diet.sg all alicia needs to do is key in her daily food intake and it will automatically tabulate the carbon emissions from what she eats chef alicia chan is trying out the climate diet what i'm having for dinner is just something i've gotten like that's like left over from work this diet devised by climate scientists and nutritionists from around the world is a detailed roadmap for how to eat in order to sustain a healthy planet but following the guidelines involves some obsessive attention to detail [Music] which is why i sought the help of tech team better.sg they spent weeks creating an app that would help alicia track the carbon emissions of everything she puts in her mouth [Music] i went out for dinner with my friends probably the first proper meal i've had all week hey so i'm trying to make good on my promise to eat less meat since yesterday's meat fest all foods have a carbon footprint we can't escape it we all need to eat [Music] which is why some companies in singapore are trying to do food production differently like the famed lab-grown chicken we made headlines around the world last december for being the first country to approve of it for public consumption investors are pouring money into agri-food tech companies in singapore placing their bets that the future of sustainable food will be in the labs not the fields while the main intention is to beef up singapore's food security could these products be a good idea for the planet [Music] too but will people have a stomach for this looking at our survey results nearly two in three are not willing to try alternative proteins like lab-grown meat insects and algae their main reason being uncomfortable about how their food was made i'm going to talk to some of these companies to find out how they plan to overcome the ick factor how are you i also want to know just how climate friendly are they i'm going to start with these so are these meant to be crab cakes it's made with microalgae protein flour it's made in a fermentation tank in a bioreactor we grow and harvest in three days compare that to be one and a half year water energy everything you know we are a fraction of what the conventional protein is microalgae are tiny cellular algae that photosynthesize and multiply in a bioreactor a piece of lab equipment in which live cell cultures can grow the result is microalgae protein flour which is an alternative protein to conventional meat like beef and seafood what about the energy required for your bioreactors energy required is only sanitization the algae grows in room temperature i think all of us are developing technology to grow food and nutrition in the metal tank why that is better is because that the conventional food and nutrition is grow out in the wild so we have to deposit i think this is meant to look like chicken and i presume it is chicken it tastes like chicken it looks like chicken it's actually chicken so yeah it is actually chicken lab-grown chicken in fact we don't really like to call it lab-grown chicken we prefer to call it culture chicken okay so there is meat that's meat but the difference is that there's no culling of animals and it's a lot better for the climate it's currently the chicken that is being shipped all the way from a particular region in the world across the globe it's a lot more efficient if i could grow that chicken locally in singapore for the local consumption each market could grow it locally for themselves eat just chicken is made by taking cells from a chicken feather and growing them in a bioreactor this mimics the inside of a chicken's body allowing the cells to multiply until they can be harvested to form chicken meat i'm going to challenge you the same thing what about the energy input into your cells culture we have empirical data there has been tremendous amount of research that has happened the quantum of carbon emission the quantum of land requirement the quantum of water requirement it's significantly lower because it's in a controlled environment that you're doing that is your chicken nutritionally equivalent to chicken yes it is we also feel that it's not really exposed to some of the diseases which could perhaps come due to improper handling of the conventional chicken so in fact i would say it's a shade better from that perspective and last but not least this taco just by tasting it alone are you able to pick up on what is the innovative ingredient i'm going to say lentils actually it's great that you mentioned that it tastes like a food product that you're familiar with right i think of all the ingredients that's put on the table the one from my company is the most unconventional one of the ingredients that is put in your taco is actually cricket powder cricket powder right so it's actually a cricket that is red in a closed environment and then it's harvested and processed into like a powder and then it can be used in any recipe protein is one of the nutrition values that is very high in cricket powder 100 grams of fresh chicken breast contains about 30 grams of protein but 100 gram of cricket powder contains about 70 grams of protein crickets are ravi's insect of choice because they are already consumed in some parts of the world but their biggest selling point is they multiply quickly so gram for gram of protein crickets produce only a quarter of the carbon emissions that chickens produce [Music] cricket cake instead of chicken anyone eating is a fairly emotional thing you're sort of putting things in your mouth how do you persuade people that these crickets chicken from a laboratory these are not words that people normally associate with food and you guys want them to think of them as food how do you do that it's some form of consumer learning that's required a consumer education that's required but once there's awareness increasing awareness amongst people they'll be increasing adoption as well so what we do is that we speak to many restaurants respect to many bakeries who understand how this product can be integrated into existing food options and they make food options like breads pizza dough pasta so you're taking something unusual but you're making it then look like something very familiar exactly right because that that actually removes many layers of uh of fear so if you can get over the ick factor these are reasonable substitutes but there are plenty of obstacles ahead like getting the product approved for sale lowering their costs to be competitive and getting the people to accept it what can we do till then [Music] alicia has been on the climate diet for the last week i'm checking back in with her to review how she did i was looking at the numbers and you've come in quite well below the recommendation yes or the diet yeah what's going on there were you able to log everything that you ate i would say i logged maybe about 80 of what i ate but due to the nature of my work i do a lot of tastings while on the go in the course of the day which it was very hard for me to log like i had a teaspoon of mashed potato or whatever it was okay when it came to making a choice between a meat-based dish or a soy based dish it was very clear to me while i was on the diet that i was going to go for the soy based dish you managed to have a fair amount of meat i just want to i'm just saying pretty much all of that meat happened on one night when i met my friends for dinner but i mean this is what's gonna happen with daily life you're gonna have a social life you're gonna go out for dinner with friends and you're not always going to have the option of having vegetarian options was that a friction in your day to have to think of every mouthful it definitely was if somebody was persuaded to try this what do you think they would be surprised at most um i think they would be surprised that it's not that hard and not that expensive if you put some effort into it so maybe you can give them a list of dishes or restaurants or places where they can buy food that would help them stick to this diet climate diet is a start it's a framework that helps us make thoughtful choices it will probably be some time before eating for the planet becomes a default rather than a challenge [Music] but for now i've learned that eating right can make as much difference as reducing single-use plastic or turning off our air conditioning from power to plastics a lot of change rests with policy makers businesses and scientists but when it comes to food you and i hold power every time we put something into our mouths [Music] the goal is simple eat less of certain foods especially those containing a lot of palm oil and meats the best part of a climate friendly diet is that it's better for our health imagine reduce our waistline and reduce lifestyle diseases and reduce carbon emissions and perhaps that is what the future should taste like [Music] you

Channel: CNA Insider

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Keywords: CNA, CNA Insider, Channel NewsAsia, Asia perspective, Asia news, Singapore, climate change, environment, sustainability, food security, food waste, global warming, carbon emissions, food system, food imports, carbon footprint, plant-based, food, methane, nitrous oxide, deforestation, agriculture, lab-grown, food tech, cultured chicken

Id: 8Yo9OfPkXvU

Length: 48min 5sec (2885 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 21 2021