Air-quality related health impacts of food in the United States

Abstract

The challenge of feeding a growing and increasingly affluent population has spurred interest in identifying diets and food production practices that improve human health and protect the environment. The environmental impacts of our food system on climate change, on land, energy, and water use, and on water quality are well established. Less is known about the role of food in influencing human health via reduced air quality. This is despite the food sector being a major contributor to air pollution and reduced air quality being the largest environmental risk to premature mortality. This dissertation addresses that gap by advancing understanding of the air-quality related health impacts of US food in three ways: (i) by examining air-quality related health impacts of individual foods and diets, I find that 80% of the 15,900 annual death from food-related fine particulate matter is attributable to animal source foods; (ii) by estimating the air-quality related health impacts of pork and chicken along 79 company-specific supply chains, I find that the associated air-quality related health damages are concentrated in a small fraction of the total companies and the slaughter facilities they operate; and (iii) by calculating the external costs linked to the air-quality related health impacts and climate impacts of individual foods, I find that total external costs of food production are comparable to the net cash income of the US farm sector. These findings can inform decisions of food producers, processors and distributors, policymakers, and the broader public interested in improving the health and environmental outcomes linked to the food we eat. Future work should explore the air-quality related health impacts of the food system at a global scale, examine the relationship between food’s air-quality related health impacts and other environmental impacts, and evaluate solutions with respect to broader social and environmental goals.