Food & Drink

Meal kits better for the environment than grocery shopping: study

Those home-delivered meal kits may come wrapped in layers of plastic, but it’s still better for Mother Earth than schlepping to Whole Foods.

A new study has found cooking your own meals produces 33 percent more greenhouse gas emissions.

The devil is in food waste, researchers at the University of Michigan said in their study published Monday.

Because grocery meals are not pre-portioned, there’s a higher chance you’ll buy too much. When that unused food spoils, it’s almost certain you’ll throw it out.

“Folks are really focused on the plastics and packaging in meal kits,” lead author and environmental scientist Shelie Miller told NPR. “That’s important, but it’s not the full story.”

Researchers ordered five meals from Blue Apron and enlisted undergraduate students to purchase the necessary ingredients to make the same recipes.

They found all the food provided by Blue Apron was used but store meals required purchasing food in bigger quantities, like a large pack of burger buns for a two-person meal.

“Even though it may seem like that pile of cardboard generated from a Blue Apron subscription is incredibly bad for the environment, that extra chicken breast bought from the grocery store that gets freezer-burned and finally gets thrown out is much worse, because of all the energy and materials that had to go into producing that chicken breast in the first place,” Miller continued in a press release.

It’s estimated up to 31 percent of the food produced in the US is wasted, according to a Department of Agriculture study from 2010.

10 percent of that occurs at the retail level — food thrown out at the supermarket — but 21 percent happens at the consumer level.

While meal kits typically have higher packaging impacts than grocery meals, food waste produces a much higher carbon footprint.

Researchers said because meal kits deliver only the food you need, the larger plastic footprint is offset by the savings from reduced waste.

“When you zoom out and look at the whole life cycle, the packaging is a relatively small contributor to the overall environmental impacts of a meal,” study author Brent Heard told NPR.

“What really ends up mattering is the quantity of food wasted throughout the supply chain.”