Portugal's recent ecological "overshoot" day has sent me down some rabbit holes

Because food is the main reason why

Earlier this week, I sent out a survey to help better inform the future of The Sauce. Thank you to everyone who has filled it out so far! Something that came up in the data time and again is that you want to hear more about life in Europe — Portugal in particular. I’m all over that, and am starting now with this essay.

Before we get into the meat of it today (pun intended), I’d love it if you could take five minutes to fill out my survey. The more submissions I get, the better picture I have of how to push The Sauce forward in a way that works for everyone:

Every country has an overshoot day when its resource demand exceeds what it can regenerate that year.

This year in Portugal overshoot day was on the 5th May. The date was 23 days earlier than last year.

The report was conducted by the environmental association Zero, which said:

the production and consumption model that sustains the Portuguese lifestyle is responsible for the imbalance.

Oof, harsh words. Makes it sound like the Portuguese are hedonistic animals intent on destroying the world with their nasty consumption habits.

The reality is, of course, a little more complex. For a start, Portugal is doing slightly better than the EU overall, whose overshoot day was on 29th April. Second, these things are never one individual’s fault. We’re talking about systematic issues at the very highest level of society, politics and, as they put it, “lifestyle.”

The most interesting thing about this report is that food consumption is the biggest culprit for Portugal’s resource overshoot, sitting at 30% of the total.

This has sent me on a deep dive into Portugal’s food habits, some of which you can see by just spending a few days in the country, some of which were rather surprising.

All of them better inform why Portugal’s food is how it is.

Something I’ve noticed since moving to Portugal is that there is a disconnect between what people outside of Portugal think Portuguese food is like and what it is actually like.

The outside perception — in my experiences at least — is that Portugal follows a Mediterranean diet. Lots of heart-healthy vegetables, nuts, seeds, olive oil and fish.

This is in part true. We eat sardines and bacalhau (salt cod) by the ton. Olive oil is our cooking fat of choice. Earlier this week I drove through Trás-os-Montes, a region famous for its food production. All I could see from the highway were carpets of olive trees.

So we’re a little bit Mediterranean. But we’re not on the Med, we’re on the Atlantic.

The Atlantic diet is a separate thing entirely and goes a long way to explain why Portugal’s overshoot day happens so early in the year..