Bananas vs Beef: carbon footprint
Bananas or Beef? Here's what each one costs the climate, measured per kilo over its whole life.
Bananas runs about 0.86 kg CO₂e a kilo. Beef runs 99.48.
Beef is the heavier choice, about 116× Bananas.
Swap Beef for Bananas and you cut about 98.62 kg a kilo, near 99% off.
Per kilo, that gap is a 577 km drive in a diesel car.
Bananas: Light. Fruit needs little land or feed, and most of its footprint is the farm and the truck.
Beef: 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.