Anil Madhavapeddy

Updated preprint on quantifying biodiversity cost of food consumption / Feb 2025

We've uploaded a revised preprint on our ongoing work on quantifying the biodiversity cost of global food consumption, lead by Thomas Ball. This is based on the recently published LIFE metric, combined with supply chain data and provenance modeling.

Of particular interest may be the new analysis in the supplementary material which analyses the biodiversity cost of common food types against their size as a "functional unit" (that is, how much is typically consumed). The results don't come too differently at a macro scale, but the breakdown is interesting to see.

Richard Mortier also pointed out some related work that he did on this topic back in 2015 at Horizon, where they did an ethanographic study on "Understanding food consumption lifecycles using wearable camera". It would be an extremely cool followup project to:

build a tool (app, whatever) that incentivised collection and enabled [privacy-preserving] sharing of such data. "A Social Food Network". -- Richard Mortier, personal communication, 2025

I'll write that up in my ideas page when I get a chance. Any other comments or questions on the preprint are, as always, very welcome! In the meanwhile, please find the preprint details below.