Chicken vs Rice: carbon footprint
Chicken9.87kg CO₂e / kg
vs
Rice4.45kg CO₂e / kg
Chicken or Rice? Here's what each one costs the climate, measured per kilo over its whole life.
Chicken runs about 9.87 kg CO₂e a kilo. Rice runs 4.45.
Chicken is the heavier choice, about 2.2× Rice.
Swap Chicken for Rice and you cut about 5.42 kg a kilo, near 55% off.
Per kilo, that gap is a 32 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.
Rice: 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.