Chicken vs Root vegetables: carbon footprint
Chicken or Root vegetables? Here's what each one costs the climate, measured per kilo over its whole life.
Chicken runs about 9.87 kg CO₂e a kilo. Root vegetables runs 0.43.
Chicken is the heavier choice, about 23× Root vegetables.
Swap Chicken for Root vegetables and you cut about 9.44 kg a kilo, near 96% off.
Per kilo, that gap is a 55 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.
Root vegetables: Cheap on carbon, heavy on calories. Storage is the main cost once it's grown.
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.