Author name: Dietitians for Climate Action

On May 3rd, I drove to Quebec City to speak at the Canadian Nutrition Society’s annual conference (a pre-conference workshop called Advancing Food System Sustainability). As a small, fairly new organization, this opportunity was a huge honour for me and for Drawdown Dietetics. I spoke on May 4th, in a big conference room in front […]

This month, our nutrition student volunteer, Natalie Nguyen, contributed to our blog again! Here she unpacks a commonly conflated view on sustainable food: the assumption that food that is healthy is also environmentally sustainable. Have you come across the phrase “What’s good for you is good for the planet”? This is a great example of

One of the difficult parts of sustainability (and health!) is that there are so many proposals to make our lives more sustainable. This often causes truly impactful solutions to get lost in a sea of possibly, somewhat impactful proposals. As with food and nutrition, people latch on to instructions to live more sustainably, and this

Happy 2023 everyone! I thought we could start the year with a light topic—research methods! About 5 years ago, I met Basak Topcu at the Canadian Association for Food Studies conference. We (Renita and I) were presenting on the same panel as Basak, who presented research from life-cycle assessment. I immediately recognized the power of

Disclaimer: Before diving in, I want to acknowledge that I have so much unearned privilege, including food security, education, whiteness, and income, and am well aware that I do not have the lived experience of many people who cannot afford food with dignity at this time.  Second disclaimer: I am not an economist. Food prices

We’ve talked quite a lot about climate-friendly diets lately, but reducing food waste is just as important, and in some modeling even more important, as a solution to climate change. It makes sense: producing most food generates greenhouse gas emissions across the supply chain, and when we waste food, those emissions are generated in the

If you work in food and nutrition, you’ve surely noticed the explosion in meat and dairy alternatives that are being developed and marketed everywhere in Canada. Even in beef-farming Alberta, I’ve seen huge billboards advertising half-beef, half-lentil burgers. When I first started sampling these foods in Calgary about 15 years ago, this was completely unimaginable.

Drawdown Dietetics is inspired by Project Drawdown, a U.S.-based charity that launched in 2017. While we’re not connected to the organization, their evidence, modelling, and approach are all central to our work. Project Drawdown’s latest update this summer included some great new solutions, like Improved Aquaculture. However, they also revised their “Plant-Rich Diets” solution in

At Drawdown Dietetics, we’ve said to ourselves over and over that we can’t let climate-friendly eating become another fad diet or passing trend. We want this to be a weight-inclusive movement that does not contribute to disordered eating. But how do we do that? The culture of sustainable food comes with so many differing, conflicting

We focus on mitigating climate change at Drawdown Dietetics, so we think a lot about which solutions are best. There’s a valid critique out there of individual-level actions on climate change, so we took a look at it for this month’s blog post.  The concept of “carbon footprints” was popularized by a fossil fuel company