Environmental Impacts of Food

What I’m getting from this is that in Australia (I’m assuming that since prawns was used, that’s probably not fair) they call pork “pig meat” and that’s wild.

I’m okay with chicken being poultry meat for whatever reason, but pig meat is unhinged.

Notably, a quick google search told me that prawn farms often replace Mangrove forests and are only productive for 3-5 years leaving a destroyed ecosystem behind.

Prawns seems suspicious. Are we counting the land used to create the food for the prawns?

So basically anything but beef and lamb is an improvement

It’s been pretty clear for a while now that animal products are terrible for our environment.

ah yes, the great banana-corn-pea diet. what could go wrong

Land Use/Land Change (LU/LC) paints a pretty dismal picture (deserved) for (most/all) meat production. However, there are more refined metrics that, while still show cattle ranching is environmentally problematic, it’s maybe half to a quarter as bad globally as standard LU/LC shows.

That’s because beef can survive by grazing on land that would otherwise be pretty unproductive (from a human if not always wilderness perspective). For example, in New Mexico, USA, there are cattle ranches that even in particularly wet years might have a grazing dyad per ~45 acres (down to 0 cattle at all in the driest year).

That would put the wettest year LU/LC numbers at requiring roughly 2M m^2 per animal (or the ~200 m^ per 100 grams) listed above, and much, much higher in dry/moderately dry years.

However, that land cannot be used for farming; it can’t reasonably be used for other grazing animals, either. It’s also worth remembering that we annihilated most of the other grazing animals local to the area, and without something stamping down and softening that hard clay, there’d be other environmental issues.

I’m not advocating for eating meat, and certainly not beef—from an environmental perspective or a health one—but it’s worth looking at these types of data from the critical view of opportunity cost.

Beef from New Mexico, as well as the cold equivalent places in Alberta, Canada, might be better than the next best option of allowing these lands to go fallow.

Conversely, in Brazil, where land is being changed from highly naturally critical forest (both to the local ecosystem and the global atmosphere), there might be no bigger blight than beef.

People need to stop with the cows vs the planet nonsense. It’s not the cows. It’s the 24/7 Kuwait tire fire. It’s China. It’s India. It’s Africa.

Edit. [you can see Kuwait graveyard from space](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/wU3Tkj2uY38)

I’m curious, why is there such a big difference between milk and cheese? Since cheese is basically just milk with some extra processing steps I figured they’d be similar? Or is the “milk” listed here milk produced only for consumption as milk, and the milk created for use in cheese is being considered separately? Or could it be because sheep and goat milk is also contributing to cheese production (though I assume that is only a small percentage).

This is at glance a load of rubbish and nonsense.
Doesn’t take in consideration where the soy beans are from for tofu, not specificing what country the beef or other sources originate from.
But nice looking grafs!

Getting 100g protein from rice?? Prepare to sit down and eat 23 cups-worth and take in 4800 calories. Including grains here alongside the traditional protein sources misses the point.

i feel like mixing up complete and incomplete proteins kinda defeats the purpose here.

Sheep often live on land that’s not well suited to much else.

More links to our world in data:

[You want to reduce the carbon footprint of your food? Focus on what you eat, not whether your food is local](https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local)

[Environmental footprints of dairy and plant-based milks](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/environmental-footprint-milks)

[Greenhouse gas emissions per 1000 kilocalories](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-kcal-poore)

[Greenhouse gas emissions per 100 grams of protein](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-per-protein-poore)

[Land use of foods per 1000 kilocalories](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/land-use-kcal-poore)

[Land use per 100 grams of protein](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/land-use-protein-poore)

[If the world adopted a plant-based diet, we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares](https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets)

isn’t the land usage for lamb mostly more marginal land?

Keeping animals is more resource intensive than farming, but land use is not mutually exclusive ro raising animals. Not all land can be used for farming either.

Chickens and ducks for example can be raised next to crops and can be beneficial to farms by eating insects and fertilizing the soil. Cattle is sometimes raised by grazing on brush and grasslands that make poor farm land. Sheep and goats can eat dense brush and be raised on rocky, hilly, or mountainous environments that cannot be used for many if not most forms of farming.

While there are other environmental impacts to consider besides just climate change, there’s a great resource to help you optimize your climate actions created by a climate scientist and the team at Drawdown: https://drawdown.org/shift

Also, feel free to join us over at /r/ClimateOffensive!

Does the data account for the vegetable protein being harder to assimilate than the animal one?

(It won’t change the conclusion – vegetables are better for the environment as source of proteins compared to meat), but it would make the comparison more accurate.

Source: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11171741/