The Life Scientific

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The Life Scientific: Sarah Bridle on the carbon footprint of food

Sarah Bridle

Sarah Bridle on the carbon footprint of food

BBC Radio 4 - The Life Scientific, Sarah Bridle on the carbon footprint of food

Why did a rising star in the study of dark energy turn her attention to climate change?

Why did a rising star in the study of dark energy turn her attention to food? Prof Sarah Bridle tells Jim Al-Khalili about her life and work.

What would happen to our carbon emissions if we all went vegan? Astrophysicist, Sarah Bridle tells Jim Al-Khalili why she switched her attention from galaxies to food.  A rising star in the study of extra-galactic astronomy, Sarah was a driving force behind one of the most ambitious astronomy projects of recent times, the Dark Energy Survey of the universe. A few years ago, she started trying to calculate the carbon emissions from different foods so that she could make more informed choices about what she was eating in terms of the impact they were having on climate change. Before long, she was adapting the statistical tools and techniques she had developed to study dark matter and dark energy, to quantify the carbon cost of different foods and lobby government to make food labels indicating carbon cost of foods compulsory.       
Producer: Anna Buckley

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Professor Jim Al-Khalili talks to leading scientists about their life and work, finding out what inspires and motivates them and asking what their discoveries might do for us in the future

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