Tofu vs Vegetables: carbon footprint
Tofu or Vegetables? Here's what each one costs the climate, measured per kilo over its whole life.
Tofu runs about 3.16 kg CO₂e a kilo. Vegetables runs 0.53.
Tofu is the heavier choice, about 6.0× Vegetables.
Swap Tofu for Vegetables and you cut about 2.63 kg a kilo, near 83% off.
Per kilo, that gap is a 15 km drive in a diesel car.
Tofu: Tofu and soy milk hand you protein at a fraction of beef's footprint. The swap that actually moves the needle.
Vegetables: 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.