Apples vs Chicken: carbon footprint
Apples or Chicken? Here's what each one costs the climate, measured per kilo over its whole life.
Apples runs about 0.43 kg CO₂e a kilo. Chicken runs 9.87.
Chicken is the heavier choice, about 23× Apples.
Swap Chicken for Apples and you cut about 9.44 kg a kilo, near 96% off.
Per kilo, that gap is a 55 km drive in a diesel car.
Apples: Light. Fruit needs little land or feed, and most of its footprint is the farm and the truck.
Chicken: Cows and sheep burp methane and need a lot of land and feed, which is why red meat towers over everything else here.
Per-kilo numbers skip portion size and how the food was farmed, so take them as the shape of things, not the last word.
More match-ups
Figures from OWID / Poore & Nemecek 2018, licensed CC-BY 4.0.
How we get these numbers: Methodology.