Are Better Menus a Key to Fighting Climate Change?
A menu designed to slash carbon emissions by 79%—while maintaining customer happiness.
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Not all meals are created equal when it comes to their impact on the planet, our health, and our excitement to eat those meals. Restaurants and dining halls have a wide degree of agency to address these factors, but it can be difficult. It’s not hard to come up with a planet-friendly choice (nearly anything plant-based will do) or a tasty choice, but combining those two factors in ways that makes patrons want to order them can pose a challenge.
One problem is that our culture puts meat at the center of our meals, so entrées without a sizable portion of meat are often seen to be lacking. Unfortunately, this gets in the way of making our diets healthier for both ourselves and the planet. However, our meal choices are highly influenced not just by what they are but by how they’re presented to us. Researchers at Stanford University have developed a way to encourage meal choices which optimize for consumer satisfaction, reduced carbon emissions, and improved animal welfare—all just by changing menus.
Dr. Kristina Gligorić, one of the researchers at Stanford working on this, says that they are succeeding. In fact, she and her team were able to design a menu which slashed carbon emissions by 79% while keeping consumer satisfaction identical compared to the original menu—something that hasn’t been done before. She was able to do this by consulting food experts and consumers, and then using a whole lot of math. Her strategy was to combine the results of Large Language Models (LLMs for short, a form of artificial intelligence) with combinatorial optimization (a technical term for making the best choice given multiple criteria) to develop a menu that appeals to consumers while omitting the most carbon-intensive ingredients. According to Dr. Gligorić, “Creativity becomes the biggest constraint” when designing menus to simultaneously meet the wide variety of criteria, which is where LLMs were able to step in. The LLMs analyzed over 520,000 recipes and 1.4 million reviews, giving them insight into what goes into making a planet-healthy meal that people enjoy.
The LLM-aided menus focus on changing three major aspects: the available meals, the ingredients in those meals, and the names and descriptions of those meals. For example, many menus can drastically reduce their carbon footprints by swapping beef dishes for chicken dishes, which maintains a similar level of consumer satisfaction. Then the menus are refined further by swapping out individual ingredients for ones that have both higher consumer satisfaction and lower carbon emissions. Lastly, the lowest emission dishes are given a makeover, changing both their names and descriptions to ones which are expected to entice the most consumers. Dr. Gligorić emphasized the value in this last strategy, saying “What makes it possible is that LLMs also edit menu names and menu descriptions: […] it may change ‘salted tofu’ to ‘veggie Asian bowl’,” leading more people to choose low carbon options that previously might not have been as exciting.
Dr. Gligorić acknowledged that this type of persuasion could also be used in non-altruistic ways. Food companies already spend lots of time and effort convincing consumers to buy food with wide profit margins. When asked if LLMs could change food marketing for the worse, Dr. Gligorić said that she is “not extremely worried[…] because the food industry has been working on [persuasion techniques] for decades.” While certain companies could marginally improve the way that they entice people to eat their unhealthy food, “the extra gains [they] can get in persuasion with unhealthy food” is much smaller than the gains for healthy and sustainable food using LLMs.
Working with dining halls and restaurants specifically in mind, Dr. Gligorić knows that her improved menus will be able to reach a wide audience. However, menus aren’t the only thing that she was able to improve using LLMs and optimization strategies. She was also able to help aid in the development of plant-based meat alternatives by optimizing the constituent ingredients—another way to reduce the carbon footprint of the food system. Each of these strategies have the potential to influence the way we consume food for the better, reducing the food system’s hefty climate impacts.
This wouldn’t be the first time that an external actor changed how we relate to food: the meat and dairy industry manufactured Americans’ ravenous attitude toward beef and milk products via lobbying for the sake of their own profit. Thankfully, this time the change we can expect from Dr. Gligorić’s optimized menus is for the good of our own health and for fighting climate change, not for lining corporate pockets. With any luck, this can help set our food system back on track and encourage a food culture that is friendlier to the planet. As the use of LLMs grows in popularity, LLM-aided menus may pop up near you. While it won’t always be obvious which menus have been created with LLMs, you can be confident that menus improved by Dr. Gligorić and her colleagues will be just as satisfying as the old ones, while helping tackle some of the biggest issues in our food system.
Dr. Gligorić’s paper, What Can Large Language Models Do for Sustainable Food? can be found here.
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