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Dear Dot,
Do chickens use less water, land, and create fewer carbon emissions than other animals that people eat? Could you break down how much carbon is produced by each type of animal: chicken, beef, pork, sheep, fish, etc?
– Marjorie
The Short Answer: If you want to eat meat, chicken and other poultry is a better choice than pretty much all other widely available options.
Dear Marjorie,
Our plates are enduring much more scrutiny these days, aren’t they? And rightfully so. What we eat has a significant impact on our personal carbon footprint.
But before I go any further, let us pause and consider that making individuals — you and me and, well, everyone else reading this — feel responsible for the fate of the planet is a feat of public relations wizardry courtesy of Exxon Mobil. You see, Exxon Mobil, faced with scientific evidence indicating that the burning of fossil fuels was turning up the temperature on our planet, decided that rather than revamping their business model to prevent the coming calamity, they’d instead shift the responsibility for climate change to individual consumption. They created a public relations campaign suggesting that if only each of us would reduce our carbon footprints, we could stop warming in its tracks. Except, well, it wouldn’t. It couldn’t. It didn’t. Not with our recycling and turning off the tap while we brush our teeth or putting on sweaters instead of turning up the thermostat. Because, Marjorie, the system was — is! — the problem. And that system doesn’t want us burning less fossil fuel, because that gives shareholders the sads.
Which isn’t to say we shouldn’t be reducing our personal reliance on fossil fuels. We should. All of us! It will save us money, and collectively we are powerful. But, while I applaud everyone’s determined, pure-hearted attempts to reduce our own carbon footprints, our focus must remain on the companies and politicians owned by companies who are determined to keep us locked into this homicidal system.
And agriculture is a part of this system, since, in the interests of mass production, it gobbles up energy and spews out pollution. There are exceptions — beautiful exceptions where farmers are working in harmony with the planet to feed the soil in order to better feed us, where they’re tapping the sun for energy, and where they’re innovating to create food security for communities that don’t have it under our conventional system. And these “exceptions” are growing more commonplace, which is a wonderful thing to behold.
What does this have to do with what we put on our plates? Well, food is one of those areas where we individuals have a lot of power. Not as much as ExxonMobil would have us believe, but more than we might otherwise think. We put agriculture on our plates three times a day. So let’s determine what the impact is — positive and negative — of that agriculture.
I passed your question along to our new intern, Holly, who, like so many young people, is a determined researcher and returned to Dot with some interesting findings. Holly turned, first, to Our World in Data, where the tireless data cruncher Hannah Ritchie works. (Ritchie produced Not the End of the World (on Amazon), a book focusing on what the numbers tell us about our path toward a sustainable planet. Bluedot editor Jim Miller wrote about the book here.)
Ritchie and her fellow data nerds took a look at the carbon emissions, water consumption, and land use of our most popular meats: beef, lamb, pork, farmed fish, poultry, and tofu (obviously a meat substitute). And then Holly, apparently also a data nerd (this delights Dot. Holly and I are just getting to know each other), gave me her calculations based on her research, telling me that producing 1 kg (2.2 pounds) of beef creates ten times more carbon dioxide than producing the same amount of poultry, consumes four times the water, and requires almost 27 times the land use.
Why such a disparity? Mostly because of the methane that cows and other ruminants produce as they digest their feed. The amount of methane depends somewhat on what the cows are eating. Grass, which is more efficiently digested, tends to produce less methane, but grass-fed cows tend to require more time to grow to the size where they’re slaughtered for food, so it mostly evens out. However, the grass that grass-fed cows eat also sequesters carbon, and one study of the carbon emissions (funded in part by General Mills) indicates that it’s more than enough to offset the carbon the grass-fed cows emit. That being said, grass-fed cows also require more land so …
With regard to all of the animals you asked about (and also tofu), here’s the chart that Holly provided, with data from Our World in Data (figures are in Metric but you Imperial holdouts certainly get the gist):
Carbon Emissions per kg of total product
- Beef: 99.48kg CO2e/kg total product
- Lamb: 39.72kg CO2e/kg total product
- Pork: 12.31kg CO2e/kg total product
- Farmed Fish 13.63kg CO2e/kg total product
- Poultry 9.87kg CO2e/kg total product
- Tofu: 3.16kg CO2e/kg total product
Water Consumption:
- Farmed Fish: 3,691 Liters/kg
- Beef: 2,714 Liters/kg
- Lamb: 1,803 Liters/kg
- Pork: 1,796 Liters/kg
- Poultry: 660 Liters/kg
- Tofu: 149 Liters/kg
Land use:
- Lamb: 369.81 m^2/kg
- Beef: 326.21 m^2/kg
- Pork: 17.36 m^2/kg
- Poultry: 12.22 m^2/kg
- Farmed Fish: 8.41 m^2/kg
- Tofu: 3.52 m^2/kg
The grass-fed vs. grain-fed debate is a bit complicated, but suffice it to say that beef tips the scales far away from chicken (and also pork and farmed fish) in environmental impact. So if you want to eat meat, chicken and other poultry is a better choice than pretty much all other widely available options. (This excludes wild-caught fish.)
Choosily,
Dot
