Chicken vs Peas: carbon footprint
Chicken or Peas? Here's what each one costs the climate, measured per kilo over its whole life.
Chicken runs about 9.87 kg CO₂e a kilo. Peas runs 0.98.
Chicken is the heavier choice, about 10× Peas.
Swap Chicken for Peas and you cut about 8.89 kg a kilo, near 90% 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.
Peas: Beans and peas fix their own nitrogen, so they dodge most fertiliser emissions. Very low.
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.