Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

There are many stages of the food system playing a part in its impact on the environment, and to understand the whole is to understand every part. The energy used at the consumption stage is substantial and needs to be better understood, in particular areas that have so far received less attention, such as the cooking energy use of different diets.
This thesis aimed to quantify the energy use for cooking in Sweden and to compare it with scenarios of future diets that are targeting a more sustainable Swedish food system. For this, the Mistra Food Futures scenario skeletons were used as examples of what such diets would contain. Existing data on the energy use of food preparation methods was used for calculating each foods energy use in cooking. In examining the results, the focus was put on the overall energy use for each of the diets as well as the different food groups consumed in the scenario diets and the current Swedish diet.
The result showed that three of the four future scenario diets had a 6-20% higher energy use than the current Swedish diet, when using the same standard of appliances, but a lower energy use when accounting for energy efficiency improvements in appliances for the future scenario diets. It was also found that a higher food volume consumption is the case for the four future scenario diets, being one of the factors in the differences in energy use. The scenario diet Food as Culture was found to have the lowest energy use in cooking out of all the diets in this study, despite containing a larger volume of food than the current Swedish diet. The different food groups were found to have large variations in their energy intensity per kg of food, affecting the food groups’ energy use. Despite this, the volume of food consumed for a food group is likely to be the main deciding factor in determining its share in the total cooking energy use.
Further research on the nutrient-energy relationship in cooking energy use could provide a better understanding of the differences between diets, as the nutrition they provide is a key aspect of their sustainability. Additionally, studying the frequency of methods used for preparing different food groups, as well as using more current data on the energy use of those methods could shed further light on the energy requirements of different diets in their cooking.