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Dear Dot,
I know moving to a plant-based diet is good for the planet. But I wonder about whether some nuts (cashews and almonds, for example) have a large footprint as well in terms of land use, water use, and transportation. What say you?
– Ann
Dear Ann,
A decade ago, Dot was in Turkey for work. Sitting at a bar one evening with a new friend (I swear, I was working! But work makes me thirsty), we began nibbling the pistachios that the bartender had put into a little bowl for us. Now, Ann, Dot had tasted pistachios before. But these pistachios existed on another plane entirely. These pistachios weren’t the salty, kinda crunchy version I was used to. These were almost creamy. A crunch without dryness. Saltiness without too much saltiness. They were sublime. I carried that taste experience home with me.
Years later, interviewing North America’s second top real estate agent for a magazine profile, I mentioned these pistachios. The realtor, originally from Iraq, picked up her phone and, to the person on the other end of the call, said something firmly and in a language I didn’t understand. Ten minutes later, her adult daughter stood at her office door holding a bag of pistachios. “Turkey!” she scoffed, shaking her head. She held the bag of nuts open to me. “Iraq … much better.” And I’ll be darned if she wasn’t right.
Nuts — truly good nuts — are a delight.
But in the interest of accuracy, Ann, many nuts are not true nuts at all. Cashews, it turns out, are drupes, alongside pistachios and almonds. A researcher at McGill University in Montreal tells us that “drupes are fruits that are fleshy on the outside and contain a shell covering a seed on the inside.” Actually, in the case of cashews, the seed grows at the bottom of the fruit, but in any case, what we consume is this seed. Peanuts are legumes — part of the pea family, making the “pea” part accurate, while the “nut” part is not. Walnuts and pecans are, according to the McGill researcher, something of a hybrid. And mangoes and peaches, which we don’t think of as nuts at all, are also drupes, though we eat their flesh, not the seed contained within. Want to get your hands on some true nuts? Reach for chestnuts, hazelnuts, and acorns.
All these picayune distinctions are enough to drive us, well, nuts. So, for our purposes, that’s exactly the term we’ll use. Nuts. To mean all the things we normally think of as nuts.
Over the past few decades, powerful marketing campaigns have convinced us that nuts, while calorie dense, are healthy. Researchers at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine determined in a study of more than 200,000 men and women in the Southern United States and Shanghai that the more nuts people consume, the lower their death rates from all causes, and especially from heart disease and stroke!
It was a big deal when we learned that it takes an entire gallon of water just to produce one almond. Ouch.
– Sophie Egan, author of How to Be A Conscious Eater
Less death is a good thing, Ann. We can all agree on that. But nuts, like any food, have an impact on our environment. Alas, we cannot live on air. So let’s consider how nuts stack up environmentally against other foods. Let’s, ahem, crack this climate nut open.
Sophie Egan wrote in How to Be a Conscious Eater (on Amazon) that more than 80% of almonds eaten around the world are grown in California. “One of the biggest gripes about the high toll on California’s drought-stricken agriculture system is that two-thirds of the almonds grown are exported,” she wrote. “This ‘virtual water’ gets shipped abroad. … So, it was a big deal when we learned that it takes an entire gallon of water just to produce one almond. Ouch. Suddenly something long seen as a sign of a health-conscious eater was making shoppers think twice.”
And what’s true for almonds is true for many nuts, including walnuts and pistachios (both of which, in the U.S., are also primarily grown in California, largely for export).
But Big Nut is pushing back. After that water bombshell, reported during the drought of 2015, Farm Together, “a farmland investment firm providing investors with creative capital solutions in real assets,” according to its site, responded that “with new technical advances in irrigation that have made almonds more water-efficient, they use much less water per kilocalorie of food than many other agricultural products.” Which is true, and something we need to consider with any choices we consumers make. If we consider something a “better choice,” we need to make clear what it’s better than. So, while almonds, indeed all nuts, do indeed require a lot of water — 4,134 liters per kilogram of food, according to Our World in Data — cheese is worse. Though, surprisingly, at least to me, producing beef requires less water — 2,714 liters per kilogram. (Beef, of course, has other issues — deforestation for grazing and carbon emissions in the form of belches and farts — that make it a less-than-stellar environmental choice.)
What’s more, we tend to nibble on nuts, as opposed to scarfing down a bowlful, so, nut per nut, the impact remains palatable.
And not all nuts have the same impact. Cashews are grown primarily in Africa, India, and, increasingly, Vietnam — and, as Dot discovers each time she buys them for Grandpa Dot, cost a small fortune. But little of that money makes its way to the workers who gather the nuts. The Guardian does a fabulous and disturbing job in this interactive story about just how poorly workers are treated, making cashews, at least metaphorically, a tough nut to swallow. If you can, buy Fair Trade cashews. (Caring for our environment must always include caring about the people with whom we share it. Companies that care little for their workers are typically as cavalier about their environmental impact.)
Also, nuts like cashews that make their way to us from far away are also saddled with so-called food miles — the energy consumed to move them from point A to point B. The closer together those points are, the fewer food miles. Thanks to another letter writer, we know that food miles are not the most egregious food-related climate issue. (Food waste is far worse.) But, as Dot responded, “Those food miles, a study published in Nature tells us, are responsible for three billion tons of carbon emissions globally each year — about 19% of total food system emissions. … Local, the study concluded, is part of tackling emissions from our plates.”
With that in mind, you might want to eat more peanuts, which (more than peaches) are Georgia’s cash crop, and 50% of the nation's peanuts come from there — farmed in the so-called Peanut Belt. (If you happen to be driving through Turner County, don’t miss the 20-foot tall peanut monument.)
If we consider something a ‘better choice,' we need to make clear what it’s better than. While nuts do indeed require a lot of water, cheese is worse.
Pecans are just a nuts’ throw away: Georgia is also the country’s pecan pie supplier, growing an average harvest of about 88 million pounds, which is enough to make 176 million pies.
Hazelnuts are another option that’s available domestically in the U.S. (Incidentally, Dot first discovered Nutella — made from European hazelnuts — when living in France in the late 1980s. Peanut butter was absent from l’épicerie shelves for reasons that seemed vague and faintly sinister.) While European hazelnuts still make up the bulk of the world’s supply, Oregon produces a smaller American variety. And take note: “As a crop, the tree is near-perfect: a low-input, low-impact woody perennial that lasts 30 to 40 years, requiring no pesticides, reducing soil erosion and nutrient runoff, sequestering carbon, and providing wildlife habitat,” according to an article in Modern Farmer. What’s more, hazelnuts have utility as a biodiesel, the article enthuses, noting that as a biodiesel feedstock, “it is superior to the soybean, with better viscosity at lower temperatures and twice the yield per acre. Finally, hazelnut remnants can be ground into meal that makes a high-quality, gluten-free feed for humans or animals.”
There’s another source of local nuts, of course, that requires little more than a willingness to eat stuff off the ground. I’m referring, of course, to foraging, which, depending on your locale, can serve up anything from pine nuts to chestnuts to beechnuts. There are a number of sites online that propose to guide you, but be warned: There’s a bit of a survivalist vibe that made Dot squirm. Google accordingly.
So, Ann, there you have it. Your question answered … in a nutshell!
Nuttily,
Dot
