"Low carb diet" had a lot of buzz in the past few years. Perhaps "low carbon diet" is next.

A while ago we wrote about the possibility of saving the world through cuisine. We were being a little hyperbolic, of course. But a new diet, written by two Bay Area residents, quite literally aims to save the environment via your food consumption.

Eugene Cordero, a professor at San Jose State, and Laura Stec, a chef in the city, are coming out with "The Global Warming Diet," which is due to be published later this year.

You can get a preview of what the book entails, though. As the Web site says, the diet book "highlights three areas where food choices effect [sic] climate change: in the production and transportation of food, land management, and breeding of livestock." It seeks to introduce readers to a more responsible way of eating, and asks you to consider facts such as "it takes 10 times more fossil fuels to produce a calorie of meat than a calorie of plant protein."

While we doubt we'd ever go fully vegetarian, we're totally interested in checking this out. For one thing, diets are sort of a hobby of ours (for crying out loud, we even tried the Shangri La Diet for a few weeks, barf). For another thing, it seems very responsible to the consider the "whats and wheres" behind your cuisine -- sort of the "Al Gore" version of making you kill and depin your own chickens before eating them.

If nothing else, it should make for some interesting fodder for discussion.