Chicken vs Tomatoes: carbon footprint
Chicken or Tomatoes? Here's what each one costs the climate, measured per kilo over its whole life.
Chicken runs about 9.87 kg CO₂e a kilo. Tomatoes runs 2.09.
Chicken is the heavier choice, about 4.7× Tomatoes.
Swap Chicken for Tomatoes and you cut about 7.78 kg a kilo, near 79% off.
Per kilo, that gap is a 46 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.
Tomatoes: About as low as food goes. Mostly the farming and getting it to the shelf.
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.