Chicken vs Maize (corn): carbon footprint
Chicken or Maize (corn)? Here's what each one costs the climate, measured per kilo over its whole life.
Chicken runs about 9.87 kg CO₂e a kilo. Maize (corn) runs 1.7.
Chicken is the heavier choice, about 5.8× Maize (corn).
Swap Chicken for Maize (corn) and you cut about 8.17 kg a kilo, near 83% off.
Per kilo, that gap is a 48 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.
Maize (corn): 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.