Perfect meal

An exploration of diet and carbon dioxide emissions

This project was born from a simple question that crossed my mind: what would be the optimal diet that:

• Provides all known nutrients in appropriate proprotions
• Minimizes CO2 emissions

Please read the caveats section below for some grounding. The goal here was:

1. To code something up with minimal time investment
2. To see what the data says about the question in a big picture kind of way

Hypotheses

• I assume, based on common wisdom, that meat will perform badly here
• I assume there will be a fair amount of vegetables and fruits
• I suspect that the most likely outcome of this exercise is some kind of hacky diet that would actually kill you (e.g. drink a gallon of olive oil every day and eat three brazil nuts)

Caveats

Obviously this question cannot truly be answered because:

• It's ill posed, as there is no unique set of nutrients that can be considered optimal for everyone or even optimal for an individual at all times
• It's impossible to know the exact CO2 emissions of a given food, as it depends on many factors such as the production method, the country of origin, etc. etc.

Please do not use this data to guide your own eating choices. This is for entertainement/educational purposes only.

Usage

I went back and forth on how to share this, and ended up doing it in a jupyter notebook format. Given the explroatory nature of this project and the educational twist, I thought a notebook would be the most digestible format.

The notebook is available here.

To run it, make sure your environment has the necessary packages installed (listed in requirements.txt).

For instance:

pyhon -m venv meal_venv
source meal_venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt