From Farm to Plate, Indonesian Foods Vary 211-Fold in Nutrition-Environment Efficiency

A groundbreaking life cycle assessment of 90 commonly consumed Indonesian foods has revealed staggering differences in how efficiently the country’s staples deliver nutrition relative to their environmental cost, with efficiencies varying by up to 211 times within a single food group. The study, published in The Lancet Regional Health – Western Pacific, is among the first to combine a full cradle-to-grave environmental analysis with a holistic nutrient profiling system in an underrepresented upper middle-income country, and it offers policymakers an unusually granular map of which foods can simultaneously advance Indonesia’s nutrition and environmental goals.

The research team, led by Sarah J. McLaren of Massey University alongside Graham A. McAuliffe, Thomas C. Ponsioen, Ratna C. Purwestri, Flaminia Ortenzi, and Ty Beal, addressed a persistent blind spot in nutritional life cycle assessment, or nLCA. Previous reviews had documented that most nLCA studies are concentrated in high-income countries, rely on nutrient indices developed from United States data, and suffer from a lack of consensus on how to define a nutritional functional unit. Indonesia, now the world’s sixteenth largest economy yet still home to a poverty rate of 9.4 percent unevenly spread across its islands, had virtually no local life cycle inventory data for its foods. Existing global meta-analyses leaned heavily on proxy data from other countries that poorly reflect Indonesian agroecological conditions, cooking practices, and waste treatment.

To close this gap, the researchers assessed 90 foods spanning five groups: animal-source foods; pulses, nuts, and seeds; starchy staples; vegetables; and fruits. The environmental side of the analysis covered seven impact categories from cradle to grave, meaning from primary production through post-harvest handling, processing, packaging, distribution, retail, home or street preparation, and finally waste treatment. The categories included climate change, scarcity-weighted water use, marine and freshwater eutrophication, terrestrial acidification, particulate matter formation, and land use. Crucially, the team modelled distinctly Indonesian realities: cooking on liquefied petroleum gas stoves, congee prepared as street food, and end-of-life treatment dominated by open dumping and burning.

The nutritional side employed the Nutritional Value Score, or NVS, a recently developed profiling system scaled from 1 to 100 that captures both essential nutrient density and protective factors against noncommunicable diseases. The NVS is the weighted mean of seven normalised dietary attributes: vitamins at 20 percent, minerals at 20 percent, protein at 12.5 percent, omega-3 fatty acids at 10 percent, fibre at 7.5 percent, calories at 7.5 percent, and nutrient ratios covering sodium to potassium, saturated to unsaturated fat, and carbohydrate to fibre at 22.5 percent, with a 25 percent penalty applied to ultraprocessed foods. Traditional Indonesian fermented foods such as tempeh and tofu are not classified as ultraprocessed and therefore escape the penalty. The functional unit was defined as 100 NVS, the highest nutritional value on the scale, of food as consumed, which required accounting for inedible fractions, cooking yield, and consumer waste when calculating the quantity of food that must be purchased.

The results expose enormous heterogeneity. Among animal-source foods, dairy products other than cheese achieved the highest enviro-nutritional efficiencies, while beef, lamb, rabbit, pork, and tilapia ranked lowest. Water use within this group ranged from 0.12 to 79.8 cubic metres per functional unit, and land use from 0.01 to 28.2 square-metre-years of crop equivalents. The drivers are well understood: enteric fermentation from ruminants generates methane, manure management produces nitrous oxide and contributes to eutrophication and acidification, and high feed conversion ratios inflate the footprint of monogastric meats. Economic allocation, which assigns most livestock system impacts to meat rather than to lower-value co-products, explains why chicken organs rank comparably to dairy products despite coming from the same birds.

In the pulses, nuts, and seeds group, cashews stood out for all the wrong reasons, showing the lowest efficiencies across most environmental categories, driven largely by poor fertiliser use efficiency in cashew cultivation. Soybean products, by contrast, achieved the highest efficiencies, aided by leguminous nitrogen fixation that reduces fertiliser requirements. Excluding cashews, variability in this group was modest for several categories but reached 211 times the lowest result for marine eutrophication, water use, and land use, while nutritional scores varied little, from 46 to 65, meaning the efficiency differences were almost entirely attributable to supply-chain activities rather than nutritional composition.

Among starchy staples, congee, the study’s only multi-ingredient food, performed three to five times worse than the next least efficient item across every category, a consequence of its high salt content as street food, an unfavourable carbohydrate-to-fibre ratio, and low overall nutrient density. White rice and rice noodles also ranked poorly, while whole wheat pasta and sweet corn performed best. Vegetables told a striking story: the five dark green leafy vegetables studied, including pumpkin leaves, drumstick leaves, sweet potato leaves, tree fern, and water spinach, achieved the highest efficiencies in the group, partly because they are low-value co-products assigned zero primary production burdens. Among fruits, imports from China ranked among the least efficient, primarily due to high water use, and durian emerged as a cautionary example: its skin comprises 76 percent of the fruit and carries more than half of its climate change impact through transport and methane emissions at end of life.

Across the life cycle, primary production dominated, contributing at least 30 percent of impacts for all categories and typically more than 95 percent for land use. Yet the relationship between nutritional value and environmental performance proved far from universal. Overall, the correlation between NVS and the enviro-nutritional single score was weak, with an R-squared of just 0.03. It was strongest for starchy staples, where per-kilogram impacts are relatively homogeneous so nutritional score drives the ranking, at R-squared 0.65, moderate for fruits at 0.30, weak for vegetables at 0.15, and effectively absent for animal-source foods at R-squared 0.00, where both nutritional value and environmental impact vary substantially and independently. The practical implication is that nutritional quality alone cannot predict environmental performance, and vice versa, particularly for animal products.

For Indonesian policy, the findings point toward concrete opportunities. The authors identify dark green leafy vegetables, chayote, carrots, papaya, guava, cantaloupe, milk, yogurt, chicken organs, whole grains, and soy products as nutritious foods with comparatively low environmental footprints. Four items, beef and chicken organs, edamame, mussels, and tuna, scored at least 65 on the NVS while ranking in the top 20 percent least impactful foods for four or more impact categories, marking them as candidates for local prioritisation. Beyond food choice, the study highlights improvements in preparation and waste management, such as reducing salt in congee and removing durian skins before distribution, alternative sourcing of domestically produced fruits and nuts, and supply-chain gains in fertiliser and irrigation efficiency. The authors caution, however, that these attributional results should be complemented by consequential analysis before recommending large dietary shifts, and that the approach requires contextualisation rather than oversimplified recommendations.

The study also delivers a substantial data contribution: an open-access life cycle inventory for Indonesian foods, built from Agri-footprint 6.3, ecoinvent 3.9.1, Agribalyse 3.1, and the World Food LCA Database 3.5, adapted with country-specific water flows and electricity grid mixes and prioritising geographical and technological representativeness. Limitations remain, including reliance on the largest supplier country for each food, inability to capture sub-national heterogeneity from Java’s volcanic soils to mountainous farming systems, and uncertainty in water scarcity characterisation factors and toxicity categories, which contributed more than half of the single score for 14 of the 90 foods. Future work should extend the method to composite dishes such as nasi goreng and soto, localise nutrient profiling weightings, and invest in sub-nationally disaggregated data on livestock, transport, and food losses. As a proof of concept, the study demonstrates that nLCA can counteract what the authors call carbon tunnel vision, replacing single-issue metrics with a nutritional lens that spans the entire food supply chain and can be adapted to other low- and middle-income countries striving to feed growing populations within planetary boundaries.

Subject of Research: Integrated enviro-nutritional life cycle assessment of commonly consumed local foods in Indonesia

Article Title: Integrated environmental and nutritional efficiencies of local foods in Indonesia: a cradle-to-grave enviro-nutritional life cycle assessment

Article References: McLaren, S. J., McAuliffe, G. A., Ponsioen, T. C., Purwestri, R. C., Ortenzi, F., & Beal, T. (2026). Integrated environmental and nutritional efficiencies of local foods in Indonesia: a cradle-to-grave enviro-nutritional life cycle assessment. The Lancet Regional Health – Western Pacific, 74, Article 101977. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lanwpc.2026.101977

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.lanwpc.2026.101977

Keywords: life cycle assessment, Indonesia, nutrition, food systems, Nutritional Value Score, sustainable diets, environmental impacts, greenhouse gas emissions, animal-source foods, leafy vegetables, food policy, Southeast Asia