Bananas vs Tofu: carbon footprint
Bananas or Tofu? Here's what each one costs the climate, measured per kilo over its whole life.
Bananas runs about 0.86 kg CO₂e a kilo. Tofu runs 3.16.
Tofu is the heavier choice, about 3.7× Bananas.
Swap Tofu for Bananas and you cut about 2.3 kg a kilo, near 73% off.
Per kilo, that gap is a 13 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.
Tofu: Tofu and soy milk hand you protein at a fraction of beef's footprint. The swap that actually moves the needle.
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.