Beef vs Wheat & rye: carbon footprint
Beef or Wheat & rye? Here's what each one costs the climate, measured per kilo over its whole life.
Beef runs about 99.48 kg CO₂e a kilo. Wheat & rye runs 1.57.
Beef is the heavier choice, about 63× Wheat & rye.
Swap Beef for Wheat & rye and you cut about 97.91 kg a kilo, near 98% off.
Per kilo, that gap is a 573 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.
Wheat & rye: Modest. Fertiliser, the field itself, and a bit of milling.
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.