What can large language models do for sustainable food?

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Thomas, Anna T., Yee, Adam, Mayne, Andrew, Mathur, Maya B., Jurafsky, Dan, Gligorić, Kristina
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Thomas, Anna T.
Yee, Adam
Mayne, Andrew
Mathur, Maya B.
Jurafsky, Dan
Gligorić, Kristina
author_facet Thomas, Anna T.
Yee, Adam
Mayne, Andrew
Mathur, Maya B.
Jurafsky, Dan
Gligorić, Kristina
contents Food systems are responsible for a third of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. We investigate what Large Language Models (LLMs) can contribute to reducing the environmental impacts of food production. We define a typology of design and prediction tasks based on the sustainable food literature and collaboration with domain experts, and evaluate six LLMs on four tasks in our typology. For example, for a sustainable protein design task, food science experts estimated that collaboration with an LLM can reduce time spent by 45% on average, compared to 22% for collaboration with another expert human food scientist. However, for a sustainable menu design task, LLMs produce suboptimal solutions when instructed to consider both human satisfaction and climate impacts. We propose a general framework for integrating LLMs with combinatorial optimization to improve reasoning capabilities. Our approach decreases emissions of food choices by 79% in a hypothetical restaurant while maintaining participants' satisfaction with their set of choices. Our results demonstrate LLMs' potential, supported by optimization techniques, to accelerate sustainable food development and adoption.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_04734
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle What can large language models do for sustainable food?
Thomas, Anna T.
Yee, Adam
Mayne, Andrew
Mathur, Maya B.
Jurafsky, Dan
Gligorić, Kristina
Computers and Society
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Food systems are responsible for a third of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. We investigate what Large Language Models (LLMs) can contribute to reducing the environmental impacts of food production. We define a typology of design and prediction tasks based on the sustainable food literature and collaboration with domain experts, and evaluate six LLMs on four tasks in our typology. For example, for a sustainable protein design task, food science experts estimated that collaboration with an LLM can reduce time spent by 45% on average, compared to 22% for collaboration with another expert human food scientist. However, for a sustainable menu design task, LLMs produce suboptimal solutions when instructed to consider both human satisfaction and climate impacts. We propose a general framework for integrating LLMs with combinatorial optimization to improve reasoning capabilities. Our approach decreases emissions of food choices by 79% in a hypothetical restaurant while maintaining participants' satisfaction with their set of choices. Our results demonstrate LLMs' potential, supported by optimization techniques, to accelerate sustainable food development and adoption.
title What can large language models do for sustainable food?
topic Computers and Society
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.04734