Cassava vs Chicken: carbon footprint
Cassava or Chicken? Here's what each one costs the climate, measured per kilo over its whole life.
Cassava runs about 1.32 kg CO₂e a kilo. Chicken runs 9.87.
Chicken is the heavier choice, about 7.5× Cassava.
Swap Chicken for Cassava and you cut about 8.55 kg a kilo, near 87% off.
Per kilo, that gap is a 50 km drive in a diesel car.
Cassava: Cheap on carbon, heavy on calories. Storage is the main cost once it's grown.
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.