Chicken vs Other fruit: carbon footprint
Chicken or Other fruit? Here's what each one costs the climate, measured per kilo over its whole life.
Chicken runs about 9.87 kg CO₂e a kilo. Other fruit runs 1.05.
Chicken is the heavier choice, about 9.4× Other fruit.
Swap Chicken for Other fruit and you cut about 8.82 kg a kilo, near 89% off.
Per kilo, that gap is a 52 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.
Other fruit: Light. Fruit needs little land or feed, and most of its footprint is the farm and the truck.
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.