How Green Is Your Meal?

Our food costs a lot more than the money we pay to eat it. Punching your numbers into an online calculator will likely yield some surprising results

How much do you eat in a week? That's the question you have to answer in the Eating Green Calculator to find out what your consumption really costs -- namely the effects of your diet on your health and the health of the environment.

The calculator is a free online application created by the Center for Science in the Public Interest. The center is a non-profit consumer advocacy group based in Washington, D.C., and Ottawa, Ontario, founded in 1971 to inform the public about "nutrition, food safety, health and other issues during a boom of consumer and environmental protection awareness," according to their Web site.

Here's one result: If you ate 3.5 ounces of chicken and one egg last week, you also used 2.7 pounds of fertilizer and created 91 pounds of manure.

Now that's food for thought.

GET INVOLVED

• Find out how green your diet is with the Eating Green Calculator
• Sign the MakeOurFoodSafe.org petition urging the US Congress to pass strong food safety legislation (US citizens only)
  

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image: a square meal (credit: katiew)