Existing frameworks

Foodprinting can incorporate multiple parameters. Foodshed mapping can be used to give a land area estimate for a geographic region, but similar analysis can be employed to specific food products. Water footprinting and carbon footprinting are also used to compare the impacts of different food choices. This type of comparison is commonly used to differentiate between products that have high environmental footprints and their alternatives, like dairy^[5] and meat.^[6][7]

Life Cycle Assessment is one analytical framework frequently used to incorporated multiple dimensions of foodprinting, though it comes with particular challenges. Life cycle assessments for industrial products have discreet inflows and outflows that are easily measured and modeled. As biological systems with high variability, however, agricultural processes are more difficult to model.^[8]

Geographic foodprinting

On a city scale, researchers have conducted foodprint analyses for cities like Paris and Melbourne.^[9][10] Researchers have also used a foodprint model to map the land required for feeding the United States.^[11]

Dietary patterns

Foodprinting has also been applied to dietary patterns as a way of predicting impacts of consumption and production shifts on the environment. The EAT Lancet commission, for example, analyzed possible dietary patterns for impacts in GHG emissions, land, water and fertilizer use, and biodiversity, ultimately recommending the "Planetary Diet" that has a low foodprint in those parameters. Similar analysis from the IPCC focuses on carbon footprints of dietary patterns.^[12] Other carbon-focused research determined that supplying and consuming the calories that fuel global obesity adds an additional 700 megatons per year of CO₂ equivalents to the atmosphere, approximately 1.6% of global carbon emissions.^[13]

The whole-diet models used to establish estimates of land requirements for the standard American diet can also be used as a comparison for projecting the land requirements of dietary shifts.^[14] Using these techniques, researchers have compared the land-area foodprint of high and low-quality diets, and found that high-quality diets could use significantly less land than current consumption patterns.^[15]