New Sustainability Ranking System Shows You How to Save the World by Eating

We remember the days before big chains like McDonald’s and Starbucks pledged to make sustainability a top priority, back when “organic” was the only health-food buzzword people cared about and using “sustainability” in a sentence usually meant we’d have to define it at least once*. But things are different now. More and more restaurants are scoring publicity by advertising their sustainability commitment, and it can be hard to judge which restaurants  are actually living up to sustainability standards and which ones are falling short.

Enter the UK-based Sustainable Restaurant Association’s new global sustainability ranking system that’s available to any restaurant in the world. The ranking system basically measures how well a restaurant fits the SRA’s tenets of sustainability (Society, Environment, and Sourcing) and then assigns a score of one, two, or three stars depending on how well they do.

The scores are then publicized to let eco-friendly consumers know where they can go to get sustainable (and delicious) food in the hopes that they’ll put their wallets where their mouths are and support sustainable dining. So far, over 500 UK restaurants have been SRA ranked and the Association provides over 1,200 restaurants with advice on how to find sustainable alternatives to traditional restaurant practices, meaning that they (and their customers) are working to save the world one bite at a time. Now that’s our kind of activism.

* For the record, being sustainable basically just means keeping an eye on how many of the planet’s resources we’re consuming.

PicThx The SRA