Cheese vs Farmed fish: carbon footprint
Cheese or Farmed fish? Here's what each one costs the climate, measured per kilo over its whole life.
Cheese runs about 23.88 kg CO₂e a kilo. Farmed fish runs 13.63.
Cheese is the heavier choice, about 1.8× Farmed fish.
Swap Cheese for Farmed fish and you cut about 10.25 kg a kilo, near 43% off.
Per kilo, that gap is a 60 km drive in a diesel car.
Cheese: Same cows, same methane. Milk and cheese carry it in every glass and slice.
Farmed fish: Farmed fish and shrimp pay for feed, energy to run the ponds, and sometimes cleared mangroves.
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.