Abstract
Objective. Some social changes, such as increment of occupied female population or aged population, effect on households’ dietary habit. In general, menus with small number of dishes or using more home-meal replacement become to be more popular than before. The environmental impacts of such changes, however, has not been clear in previous studies. In this paper we inquired about actual condition of households’ dietary habit and estimated environmental impacts of 12 “representative menus” which reflect usual consumers’ everyday eating habit. The final goal of our research is to evaluate LCA effects of households’ dietary habit caused by social reasons as mentioned above.
Results and Discussion. The data were assembled by questionnaires from randomly-selected 194 households in Kanto Area of Japan (Tokyo, Kanagawa, Saitama and Chiba) about menu and food ingredients used for each menu on everyday meals (3 meals [breakfast, lunch, dinner] for 365 days). Based on analyses of the households data, we found that the availability of home-meal replacement and the choice of menu type (Japanese, Western, Chinese cuisines) have affected by several factors such as available spare time for cooking, rate of family involvement to a meal, and wife’s age. Based on the data we set 12 “representative menus”, and estimated the LCA impacts from each of them. As a result, the LCA impact of Japanese style menu has relatively small although it has relatively many dishes. On the other hand, the LCA impact of Western style menu has relatively large although it has relatively small dishes.
Conclusions. Using the results of LCA impacts from the representative menus, we estimated the change of CO2 emission induced by dietary habit which occurs when occupied female population or aged population will grow. To avoid increasing emission of CO2 induced by dietary habit, it will be effective to use home meal replacement or restaurant service appropriately as well as to reduce cooking energy.
