Emergy-Based Sustainability Evaluation and Optimization Scenarios for 341 Chinese Home-Cooked Dishes

Chinese home-cooked dishes (CHCDs) link agricultural production and daily consumption, but their resource dependence and sustainability remain poorly quantified. We standardized 341 recipes from China's 34 provincial-level administrative regions, conducted a production-to-consumption analysis using emergy (solar-equivalent available energy directly and indirectly required for a product or service), and evaluated six optimization scenarios. Mean emergy input was 5.93 × 10¹² sej·dish^-1, with nonrenewable purchased inputs accounting for 77.99%. Ingredients, oil and sauces, and cooking contributed 69.17%, 21.69%, and 9.14%, respectively. Plant-based production relied on labor and chemical inputs; animal-based production relied on feed. Ruminant meats had relatively high nonrenewable inputs and environmental loads; vegetables had lower values. Across CHCDs, the emergy sustainability index (ESI), transformity, emergy consumption intensity, and food processing intensity averaged 0.26, 1.02 × 10⁶ sej·J^-1, 1.45 × 10¹² sej·serving^-1, and 4.64 × 10¹¹ sej·serving^-1, respectively. Sustainability declined from plant-based through mixed to animal-based dishes. Shandong cuisine ranked highest and Zhejiang cuisine lowest in combined sustainability and efficiency. Combining crop-livestock recycling, mechanization and energy-efficiency improvements, technological advancement and scaling up, moderate oil and sauce reduction, and cooking-efficiency improvements was projected to increase ESI by 19.34% relative to baseline. These results support dish-level emergy accounting for improving agri-food sustainability.