If the non-food products (which account for about 40% of the animal) are accounted for, the food-CO2 falls by ~40% to about 51.
This doesn’t seem to take into account methane production and its effect on the climate either, which would probably put cows and pigs much higher.
Right. Cattle produces a lot more than just beef. Leather, horns, bones, and hooves are additional products that come from the cow. Then there’s all the animal feed and plant fertilizer that come from the less desirable parts of the cow. I wonder what the carbon footprint is when the entirety of the cow is taken into account. No part of the animal is wasted during rendering.
Another “fun” chart on various food sources green house gas emissions adjusted per kilogram of food product.
I love how the chart breaks cows into multiple categories making it look that much smaller even though it’s still chart topping.
Edit: Oddly enough they’re citing the same data in both the one I link and OP’s link.
Why is Kilograms of food product the one axis? shouldn’t it be kcals or something?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-kcal-poore
They have that too. Beef is still the worst by a huge margin
That would also be a very nice comparison and honestly probably a better one given how different food have very different calorie densities.
Now I’m really curious about calorie density of the various categories listed in the chart, I’m probably going to have to do some napkin math to get a small ball park.
I know I won’t be anywhere close to the actual figure but I may be close enough to satisfy my curiosity.
Edit: Thinking about it a bit though brings to mind that the calculations there would be incredibly difficult and would likely require a lot of averages.
You should probably take into account beneficial and harmful effects of each food type as well (including externalities such as healthcare costs), although that would be an even more difficult task.
Though this is a great chart, it isn’t quite the whole picture either for climate impact. Almonds and almond milk get to be a lot worse alternative option if you consider the water consumption concerns where they are grown in California. They have many similar charts that attempt to quantify holistic carbon footprint.
Long story short, though not eating animal products is best for the environment, even just eating beef less often and not worrying about eggs and chickens can get you to over half the climate impact of full veganism and is a much easier transition for some.
it’s basic physics: animal products consume more energy (calories) than they produce in food because they exert energy on living - moving, eating, converting food to energy, etc.
Eating a plant directly (or with comparable processing to meat) means less wasted energy (as in calories burned compared to calories produced as food) simply because you’re going one step higher (lower?) in the food chain to obtain that energy.
Isn’t air travel and large ships far worse for the environment? I don’t mean to derail a conversation, but I suspect that air travel and ocean liners have a significantly bigger impact and I don’t see as much coverage on that issue.
Fortunately, we have a series of tubes connecting every computer on the planet that can help answer questions like this!
In short Aviation (1.9%) and Shipping (1.7%) are smaller than Livestock & Manure (5.8%) even before factoring in the secondary impacts that are largely driven by the livestock industry, like land use change, soil loss, and deforestation.
If you’re specifically talking about transportation emissions for food, there’s a graph for that as well!
Supply chain represents ~18% of the overall food footprint, smaller than livestock and land use changes.
Talking meat specifically, the transportation emissions are a tiny piece of their overall footprint, as is shown in the OP.
Damn these charts are nicely made.
Agriculture makes up a full quarter of our total emissions. Some of that is because of shipping it, of course, but there is absolutely no question whatsoever that agriculture is a huge contributing factor to climate change
Data about greenhouse emissions from transportation is talked about more frequently than any other source in my experience. I don’t see the relevance to this data as beef and tofu can be produced locally or shipped overseas, so the emissions to produce the product would be a separate discussion versus emissions in transit.
I don’t see as much coverage on that issue.
No, there’s plenty of coverage. If anything, there isn’t enough coverage on animal agriculture because people can’t fathom a world where they don’t eat meat (or even just significantly reduce their consumption).
You are not derailing, you are putting the topic back on track.
We can talk about both issues, as I think they are both important, but I suspect that the larger issue is being ignored because it threatens establishment interests.
I didn’t realize that there was a direct correlation between CO2 expenditure during food production and the final product’s flavour
anywhere that compares by calorie? just curious
Someone shared below, but here you go: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-kcal-poore
oops forgot to update comment when I saw that. thanks tho
Don’t forget also that meat products need to be fed calories before you get calories back from them. Look up trophic levels if you want more info, but I believe the rule of thumb is 10x the amount of calories needed for most meat products.
It’s amazing how much food you have to eat when you’re a vegetarian. I went vegetarian for about a year. After my first month I felt like I was dying. Simple things like putting on my shoes left me exhausted. I finally started using a calorie calculator and discovered I was getting about a thousand less calories per day than I actually needed.
I was a banker mason for 10 years before going back to university, carving stone almost every day for years, I went vegan 5 years in and I didn’t experience a sudden drop in energy, I made sure I was getting enough protein and adequate amounts of vitamins (especially b12) either through food groups of vitamins tablets.
Also after not eating beef I haven’t lost any muscle mass, I may be crazy but I think big beef has been lying for decades.
big beef has been lying for decades
That’s exactly what my ex-wife said.
Why is beef from a beef herd worse than beef from a dairy herd?
I think just because dairy cows live longer. Beef cows are killed younger, you don’t need to wait until their milk production dwindles. It’s not clear if accounting for the milk carbon footprint was taken into account or not.
So avoid beef, lamb, and mutton, got it.
I was curious and went looking because I suspected it was low emissions but not how low. Research seems to suggest Kangaroo meat is significantly lower GHG per kg than tofu!
In our calculations we use 1.30 CO2 equivalents for one kilogram production of kangaroo meat which is an average of the estimates reported in the literature
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5308823/
The biggest difference here is not related to the animals themselves, but the scale.
Much of beef’s emissions has to do with land use changes and diet which are both a necessary (but unfortunate) part of managing 1.5 billion cows to serve as a primary protein source for billions of people. In comparison, there’s somewhere on the order of 30 million kangaroos on the planet (2% of the number of cows) and I’d wager the overwhelming majority of them are wild, not farmed for meat.
The difference in footprints here shows the differences in management practices and the downside of commercial ranching. If everyone on The planet switched their 0.5 servings of beef per day for 0.5 servings of kangaroos, nothing would be fundamentally different in the environmental outcomes. We’d still be clearing forests in the Amazon, just now it would be for kangaroos.
Sustainable meat consumption is only achieved through dramatic reductions in consumption. People don’t have to quit meat, but it does have to become a thing reserved only for special occasions. Like it or not, the only path to sustainable food consumption requires everyone eating veggies (including the dreaded tofu) most of the time. Getting beef fed things like seaweed increases the portion of yearly meals that can include red meat sustainably, but does not somehow eliminate the fact that there majority of people’s meals need to avoid red meat (sorry folks).
If everyone on The planet switched their 0.5 servings of beef per day for 0.5 servings of kangaroos, nothing would be fundamentally different
So you aren’t interested in the evidence, got it.
You have evidence that farming 10 billion+ kangaroos (it would probably have to be closer to 15 billion, based on the weight differences, ~200 lb/roo vs ~2000 lb/cow) can be done without any compounding burdens, e.g., land use changes, increasing the CO2/kg?
Are there a lot of studies in industrial-scale kangaroo farming? I’m very much interested in evidence on how we could sustainably manage and farm tens of billions of animals to feed a global population at today’s levels of meat consumption.
If you’re comparing the footprint of wild caught kangaroos with industrially farmed beef you’re comparing apples to oranges. One cannot be a substitute for the other because they exist on tremendously different scales. Unless of course you have evidence on how we manage wild kangaroos to feed 7 billion people. If you do, please oh please share. I am definitely interested in the evidence!
In not disagreeing with what was presented, that wild caught kangaroo is lower carbon intensity than industrially farmed beef, I’m only disagreeing with the clear implication of that statement and its context; that we could somehow swap one for the other and not have to change our levels of consumption. So please, show me the data on global-population-feeding scale kangaroo farming, I’ll retract my previous statement and issue a formal apology in the Australian Times.
I don’t recall saying that kangaroo could or should replace beef globally. You’ve taken my observation of a single data point and practically built an army of straw men.
Congratulations it is entirely clear that you are so blinded by whatever ideology you possess that you cannot critically assess new information or meaningfully participate in any discussion.
You’ve got this all so backwards it’s mind numbing. Everything the other person says was correct.
Kangaroos dont fart methane you fucking moron.
Unlike cows.
Even if you replaced all land used by cows with kangaroos they would be lower emissions but I never fucking said that to start with.
I observed that kangaroos are lower GHG emissions than tofu per kg you illiterate fuck.
Beef and tofu and not nutritionally equivalent.
Did I have some sort of a stroke or something? Am I hallucinating graphs that don’t exist? Is OPs chart only showing tofu as an alternative and I just imagined the dozen or so other foods on the list that can be mixed and matched to build a nutritious meal with a significantly lower carbon footprint than beef?
Someone please send help, because all of these beef shills have me convinced that there are only two foods and we must all choose just one in the great food war
I like beef
Cool. I like rainforests, a stable climate, and my health. But I guess we each have our own priorities.
I’d trade all the beef for not having to wonder if the planet is going to take a dump right when I’m getting old and am less able to handle it.
The answer isn’t to change the ancestral diet of an entire species (everyone going vegan is simply not going to happen, even less likely than degrowth), it’s to degrow into numbers that are sustainable for the planet (i.e. eliminate the exploitative economic systems that drive this population growth).
Sadly, what’s almost certainly gonna happen is neither of our choices because we’re going to continue our population explosion AND eat meat until famine or something like that wipes our unsustainable societies.
So you’re saying it’s easier to get an entire population to dramatically reduce their rates of procreation than to give up some of the meat in their diets? Not sure I buy it
Yep, not only procreation but consumption and waste as well, and actually both have evidence of them happening.
https://www.npr.org/2021/05/09/995172945/u-s-birthrate-drops-to-lowest-level-in-four-decades
What I’m really saying, is that if a solution depends on everybody becoming a good person and doing the right things forever into the future, it’s a non-starter. How are you going to ensure nobody eats meat? Gonna have global enforcement? What’s the punishment? Humans are hard-wired to crave meat, that isn’t going away and telling people not to eat meat is akin to telling people not to have sex.
Instead, if the economic system and the culture changes then the motivation to do certain things changes. Maybe our culture changes so that getting married and having kids is no longer the expected route and you don’t become the weird aunt/uncle for doing so, happening already. Maybe flexitarianism becomes more popular and reduces damage and cruelty from animal agriculture without expecting radical shifts in ancestral diets?
I’m not sure how old you are, I’m nearly 50 and trans and I’ve seen massive cultural change and that’s really the key to changing the world. For example, I’m a trans woman, when I transitioned 20 years ago it was viewed as absolutely bonkers by everyone around me, and that was in California. I lost most of my family and friends and had no right to employment or housing. Now, it’s common and though there are outspoken right wingers, liberals are like “oh, you want to be girl, sure, also the state protects your right to employment and housing”.
Good call, we should fortify tofu with fluoride to help out!
One’s a food. The other I think is plastic.
FYI: the packaging is not edible.
Can I get some numbers on a bottle of Gochujang sauce?
I am all for meat free (or lab grown) alternatives and they’re getting better but honestly in their current state if I had to eat tofu instead of beef I’d just eat neither. (Maybe I’ve just been unlucky and only tried really bad tofu?)
Tofu is really easy to prepare poorly, it’s important to season it heavily as bland tofu doesn’t really taste like anything. But this makes tofu extremely versatile, it can even be used in smoothies.
Exactly. There are so many who don’t like tofu. Like my mother in-law, who just took a bite of raw tofu and came to the conclusion it’s not for her. Yeah, no shit.
My wife and I then spent some time serving her various recipes, where tofu is one of the main ingredients. And now she likes it.I like, what my wife says about tofu: it’s like a blank canvas. You have to paint it with spices and various cooking methods to make it beautiful.
Another comparison are Mozzarella cheese or noodles. Bland and boring on their own, but great in combination with sauces and spices.
… Now I wan’t to eat the “scrambled tofu”, my wife sometimes cooks. It’s fucking delicious.
Adding here - have people ever had plain, microwaved chicken? If that sounds disgusting to you, but that’s how you expect veggies (/tofu) to be prepared, you may be failing to grasp the concept of cooking vegetables with the same care and attention that one would prepare a piece of meat.
Literally every time I cook for someone who says “I’ve always hated X veggie” they come out of it going “wow, I’ve never had it cooked like that, that was really good, nothing like how (parent) used to make it”.
99x out of 100, all I did was roast it with some seasoning (+salt), exactly like I would treat a piece of meat, and they act like their whole childhood was a lie.
The other comments are right, but if you don’t like tofu there are absolutely other options. Legumes in particular are really good for the same kind of role in many dishes, and in my opinion are generally far more enjoyable. Get some mushroom and/or seaweed flavours in there for the umami and butter beans for the texture and all the nutritional goodness and I’m a happy man
Like meat, tofu us an acquired taste and needs to be prepared properly. There’s no fat in tofu to make it taste like anything
Yeah i find that frying tofu in a fatty oil like olive oil helps a lot with making tofu taste better. Once you get a good “meaty” tofu its way easier to move to other styles of tofu, at least anecdotally speaking.
Sometimes I like to splurge and buy those pre-marinated tofus. I really like the texture of hard tofu. I don’t miss the texture of meat at all.
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If I wanted the extra work I would buy store bought. But I actually love cooking and want a tofu press. But it’s convinient that it exists.
My beef also isn’t genetically modified to survive glyphosate, which gets absorbed by the soy that gets turned into your tofu.
If industrial farms would sell the manure and spread it on fields rather than blanket them with petrolchemicals (fertilizers) this entire argument would be completely moot.
We need to return to traditional farming where the cattle can graze and naturally fertilize the land instead of being confined and mainly fed corn (which exacerbates the spread of ecoli).
Traditional farming can also reverse desertification of land therefore can reduce the CO2 footprint of this industry.
I’m not saying don’t be vegan, just take a look beyond these studies that are cherry picked to cement your opinions on us monsters that are so apparently destroying this planet.
Also get mad at the military and they are the top contributors of CO2 emissions and they have 0 restrictions and are omitted from every study.
This is a lot to unpack, but I’ll do my best in case it helps someone understand theses issues better:
My beef also isn’t genetically modified to survive glyphosate, which gets absorbed by the soy that gets turned into your tofu
Glyphosate is bad, and should be banned. That said, beef is not somehow immune to glyphosate, as it is a contaminant in much of the food sources cattle eat, and the food for our food is not as strictly regulated as our food. Source Additionally:
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Much of the glyphosate found in food is found in grains, which are often served as accompaniment to a primary protein (e.g., meat or plant proteins). Swapping a beef burger for a veggie burger (or, your tofu straw man), likely does little to reduce overall glyphosate exposure, which would be coming from the bun. Using plant glyphosate levels as a negative for going vegan is deceptive at best.
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Glyphosate is not allowed in organic farming, so buying organic foods, including plant based protein alternatives, like organic tofu, dramatically reduces exposure to glyphosates. The system isn’t perfect but has been shown to quickly and effectively reduce glyphosate levels. Source
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While “there is currently no consensus among the scientific community, and there is controversy over the safety of glyphosate and its health consequences” Source, there are studies showing correlation with negative health outcomes, so someone playing it safe may want to avoid these chemicals out of an abundance of caution. THAT SAID, there is a significant body of evidence that consuming red meat is linked to increase the risk of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and premature death. Source. Another Source. If you’re avoiding “tofu” for your health, you’re not doing yourself any favors.
If industrial farms would sell the manure and spread it on fields rather than blanket them with petrolchemicals (fertilizers) this entire argument would be completely moot.
No. Manure is only a small part of the issue. Much of the methane produced by cattle comes from digestion, not excrement. Additionally, much of the carbon footprint of cattle is a result of land use change, specifically deforestation and other land use change. None of this is solved by spreading shit around. (And its unclear from your comment but just in case it needs to be said, fertilizers and glyphosate are unrelated, but I think you know that, it was just unclear)
We need to return to traditional farming where the cattle can graze and naturally fertilize the land instead of being confined and mainly fed corn (which exacerbates the spread of ecoli).
The concept of regenerative farming is thrown around a lot as a justification for eating beef. First of all, its not happening, so stop using a pretend what if to justify bad behavior.
Secondly, a cow can graze the food it needs off of ~2 acres of (highly productive) land per head. Source.
To meet today’s meat demand, there’s ~1.5 billion cows on the planet. If you were to give each cow 2 acres, that would take 3 billion acres of land, or 1.5x the land area of the continental US. This would be a logistical nightmare in addition to all of the other challenges that come with this land grab. There’s no scenario where we maintain current meat consumption levels sustainably.
At some point people are going to have to put down the steak and gasp eat some tofu.
Traditional farming can also reverse desertification of land therefore can reduce the CO2 footprint of this industry.
No beef required for this one. Though it is worth noting much of the desertification is directly a result of clearing land for cattle and their feed.
Also get mad at the military and they are the top contributors of CO2 emissions and they have 0 restrictions and are omitted from every study.
Agreed!
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But i need to eat meat.
No one here is saying you can’t, are you trying to get permission? This is just pointing out it has a larger environmental impact than non-meat food sources.
Less people, less problems. Walk around Bandung Indonesia and I’ll show you 10 people polluting to your 1 American. Good luck.
