The climate impact of our diets, and how to reduce it
What we eat has an enormous impact on our environment: it’s estimated that one-third of human-caused global emissions are linked to food. One third!
Most of those emissions happen at the production end:
- Emissions from converting forests to farmland
- Emissions from the use of manure and nitrogen fertilizer in crop production
- Methane from the digestive systems of cattle and other ruminants
The rest come from processing, packaging, refrigeration, transportation and food waste.
We all need to eat, but as this chart* from Our World in Data shows, different foods have vastly different carbon footprints and climate impacts.

For example, the emissions from consuming one kilogram of beef (from a conventionally-raised beef herd) are equivalent to burning 26 litres of gas – enough for a 395 KM trip in a Honda Civic LX sedan. On the other hand, the emissions from consuming one kilogram of wheat and rye (the main ingredients in bread and pasta) are equivalent to burning just over half a litre of gas, or enough for a 9 KM hop in the Civic.
Clearly, our food choices make a dramatic difference in the carbon footprint of our diets. So why not consider using the above chart as a guide?
One last point: a few months back, a friend sent me a photo of the menu in a restaurant she’d visited in England with the carbon footprint of each dish next to the price – ouch. But if menu reminders work for calories, why wouldn’t they work for carbon? Research suggests they do, if done properly. As well, some companies already have carbon labels on their products or plan to do so, to help grocery shoppers make sustainable choices (and grow their market share, of course!).
*Calculating carbon footprints is very complicated and methodologies may have changed since this chart was created in 2020, but it should still serve as a reasonably accurate guide.
This story was brought to Nouzie by RSS. The original post can be found on https://carlsgreenideas.wordpress.com/2024/11/12/the-carbon-footprint-of-food/