The food sector is a major consumer of energy: the amount of energy necessary to cultivate, process, pack and bring the food to European citizens’ tables accounted for 17% of the EU’s gross energy consumption in 2013.

Whenever you order food at a restaurant, the question about how much energy it took for your order to reach you wouldn’t cross your mind on a regular day. This project aims at bringing that information to light. To achieve this goal, Abhishek studied reports from the European Commission regarding how much energy is spent in the food sector and the sources of the energy.

To calculate the total energy spent on a food item, energy consumption pertaining to a variety of ingredients was studied under two major factors—direct and indirect energy. To understand the data, reports indicating the energy input and output in the agriculture, storage and transportation phases of an ingredient were key. That study yielded numbers which were then divided to find out the exact amount of energy required for a suggested quantity of the ingredient and then added up according to the recipe.

The study is presented in the form of a simple and clean web interface that compares the findings in the context of more economical elements of our everyday lives.