Our story

The original motivation for the creation of foodoffset.org came about essentially as a self-help idea. From pondering about: What does it help to have this cheap meat available in shops and restaurants, if we know with certainty that most of it comes from animals held in conditions that are simply appalling if animals are capable of feelings of pain and stress? Unfortunately, even if gradually reducing meat intake, at least dairy products and eggs are not trivial to fully avoid especially in ready-made meals convenient for active persons with short lunches or dinners. There just seemed no easy solution: fully avoiding consumption of animal products of dubious origin was – even if theoretically not very difficult – not trivial. But being a net contributor to the so prevalent animal cruelty just did not make sense either; in fact it seemed increasingly inexcusable.

This is when the idea of compensating animal welfare was born. Why would we not take a bit of time, and search for a place where we can sponsor an elevation of applied welfare standards somewhere in the food chain?

This seemed especially conducive to the reduction of total animal suffering if the improvement of animal standards happened with no lantern being hung on it: if the sponsored producer officially sold its better products as organic or so, she might merely replace a pre-existing organic market participant, rather than increase the total amount of organic producers and products. In other words, in order to really increase the relative consumption of higher standard products as opposed to low standard products, we need to ensure that some of the demand for low standard products is met by higher standard ones. After all, we cannot easily change the general demand for the different types of products, at least not in an easy, centralized way.

Following the initial thoughts about this, we grew more and more confident that the approach would help us have a positive net impact on animal welfare, even if we could not claim to address all fundamental problems associated with the concept of holding and ultimately killing animals just for the sake of eating their flesh or eggs. Eventually we had the insight that this compensation could be helpful also for you – and for the animals for whose welfare you might to some extent want to become patron by donating to our projects.

We liked the idea of stirring up a debate, especially as we think this debate must ultimately result in increasing people’s awareness about the atrocities in the modern food industry. We wanted to create a platform not only for compensation, and certainly not one that hails compensation as the solution to everything. Instead we wanted the platform to also be a starting point for critical thinking about the topic of animal welfare, whose importance one can hardly overestimate.

Ultimately these thoughts gave birth to foodoffset.org. We refined the concept to account for food to lead not only to animal welfare problems but also to severe environmental issues. Accounting for the environmental dimension seemed especially relevant as – somewhat counterintuitively – treating animals better does not necessarily go in hand with betterment for the rest of the environment. Instead, rearing animals more carefully can increase the environmental foodprint. Besides indirect effects on biodiversity and other particular problems, this is notably the case regarding greenhouse-gas emissions, for which compensation solutions are readily available. Therefore we decided to start with adding the option to offset food-related CO₂ on our page.