A Culturally Acceptable Shift in Diet to Reduce Land Footprint: an Optimization Study for Estonia

We investigated how the land footprint of food consumption in Estonia could be decreased through socially acceptable moderate dietary changes while ensuring adequate nutrition. Estonian food consumption was categorized into 14 groups. Five diets were evaluated, including a reference diet, a nationally recommended diet (NRD) by the National Institute of Health Development, and three optimized diets that minimized the consumption land footprint and deviation from the reference diet. The study found that adopting an optimized diet resulted in a decrease in the consumption of milk and red meat, and an increase in the consumption of cereals, tubers, vegetable oils, and nuts, ultimately leading to an up to 56% reduction in the diet-related land footprint. Internal and external land footprints were also estimated using the share of import in the supply. This research offers a highly adaptable modeling framework that could be useful in similar research endeavors.