Cheese vs Chicken: carbon footprint
Cheese or Chicken? Here's what each one costs the climate, measured per kilo over its whole life.
Cheese runs about 23.88 kg CO₂e a kilo. Chicken runs 9.87.
Cheese is the heavier choice, about 2.4× Chicken.
Swap Cheese for Chicken and you cut about 14.01 kg a kilo, near 59% off.
Per kilo, that gap is a 82 km drive in a diesel car.
Cheese: Same cows, same methane. Milk and cheese carry it in every glass and slice.
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.