“As both a food editor and a home cook, I had questions, and they bubbled up constantly,” said Emily Weinstein, a deputy Food editor who suggested the collaboration. “Every time I bought groceries I wondered what the best choice was from an environmental perspective: Should I buy greens in a plastic bag or a plastic tub? Was canned tuna bad? Was salmon bad? Beef was probably bad — but what about beef from the farmers’ market?”

We gathered editors from both desks to shape the collaboration, and decided that the Food section would do an entire issue dedicated to climate. It would be “Climate Week” at the Food desk and “Food Week” at the Climate desk. (“Every week is food week!” said one of the editors on Climate.)

We invited Brad Plumer, a Climate reporter, and Julia Moskin, a Food reporter, to join with Rebecca Lieberman, Eden Weingart and Nadja Popovich, who are visual journalists, to find answers to dozens of climate-related food questions and decide the best way to present that to readers. Their comprehensive visual story became the anchor of the collaboration.

“It was so obvious we needed to do this,” said Sam Sifton, the Food editor at The Times. “The science, after all, is clear. The climate is changing. And a lot of home cooks have been left paralyzed at the stove or in the marketplace as a result. What, in general, are we supposed to buy and cook, if we want to help reduce our carbon footprints, the carbon footprints of our nation, our world?”

We also wanted to make this personal, because food choices are incredibly personal. We were all curious about how our food choices compared with those of other Americans. The result: a quiz to calculate the climate impact of the foods most similar to what you ate for breakfast, lunch and dinner yesterday. It’s a good tool to see which foods have the highest impact. One takeaway: You don’t have to become a vegetarian to reduce your climate footprint. Simply eating less meat and more plants, or choosing chicken instead of beef, can make a difference.