Beef vs Onions & leeks: carbon footprint
Beef or Onions & leeks? Here's what each one costs the climate, measured per kilo over its whole life.
Beef runs about 99.48 kg CO₂e a kilo. Onions & leeks runs 0.5.
Beef is the heavier choice, about 199× Onions & leeks.
Swap Beef for Onions & leeks and you cut about 98.98 kg a kilo, near 99% off.
Per kilo, that gap is a 579 km drive in a diesel car.
Beef: Cows and sheep burp methane and need a lot of land and feed, which is why red meat towers over everything else here.
Onions & leeks: About as low as food goes. Mostly the farming and getting it to the shelf.
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.