Chicken vs Dark chocolate: carbon footprint
Chicken or Dark chocolate? Here's what each one costs the climate, measured per kilo over its whole life.
Chicken runs about 9.87 kg CO₂e a kilo. Dark chocolate runs 46.65.
Dark chocolate is the heavier choice, about 4.7× Chicken.
Swap Dark chocolate for Chicken and you cut about 36.78 kg a kilo, near 79% off.
Per kilo, that gap is a 215 km drive in a diesel car.
Chicken: Cows and sheep burp methane and need a lot of land and feed, which is why red meat towers over everything else here.
Dark chocolate: Cocoa is tied to deforestation, so a chocolate bar hides a surprisingly heavy footprint.
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.