Carbon Cafe

Note: Making these materials and practicing to facilitate demonstrations for others can also be a learning experience for students.

1. Food cubes can be prepared from small boxes (3” x 3” boxes work well).
    
2. Wrap appropriate quantities of fishing weights with bubble wrap, using the “Carbon Weight” in Table 1 below to determine quantities to put in each box.
    
3. Place the bubble wrapped weights in the boxes.
    
4. Wrap boxes with paper and decorate with pictures of the appropriate food group.

Why Do We Care?

What we eat and how we grow food has a bigger impact on the planet’s landscapes, water resources, and climate than anything else we do.

Impact Story:

Agriculture already uses up to 40% of our planet’s land area, drives 70% of our freshwater withdrawals worldwide, and produces over one-quarter of our greenhouse gas emissions -- mainly through deforestation, methane emissions from cattle and rice fields, and nitrous oxide emissions from fertilizer overuse. It also drives species extinctions and causes the greatest ecological damage to land and water. There is no landscape on the planet that hasn’t felt our impact, in large part due to agricultural activity.

Different amounts of energy and resources go into growing and producing food. Some foods require more resources and produce more waste than others and therefore have a bigger environmental impact. Measuring food’s carbon footprint is one way to understand its environmental effect. Understanding this relationship can help us make better food choices that benefit the health of our environment.

Interact with the Cubes!

The Carbon Café cubes reinforce concepts through tactile interactions. Weighted cubes indicate the relative carbon footprints from growing, processing, transporting, and producing the food.

Use the Carbon Café food cubes to initiate conversation about making better food choices for the health of our environment, through developing an understanding of relative carbon footprints of various foods.

Key Messages:

1. Modern agriculture inevitably contributes to climate change, but some foods have a bigger impact than others. Beef, lamb, and cheese tend to do the most climate damage. Pork, chicken and eggs are in the middle. Plants of all kinds typically have the lowest impact.
    
2. What you eat matters a lot more than whether it's local or organic, or what kind of bag you use to carry it home from the store.
    
3. You don't have to give up meat altogether to make a difference. Even smaller shifts, like eating less meat and more plants, or switching from beef to chicken, can reduce your climate footprint.
    
4. One simple way to cut your food-related emissions is to waste less. Buying what you need and actually eating it—instead of tossing it out—means that the energy used to produce your food has been spent efficiently.

Learn tips to avoid wasting food and other simple ways to improve your impact on the environment with Your Plan, Your Planet, a tool from Google and the Academy.

These science-based tips offer ways to make a difference by focusing on the three areas where humans have the most impact: food, water, and energy. You'll also learn about the Circular Economy to extend the life of your stuff.