Carbon Footprint of your Food

It turns out that beef and cheese create a much, much worse carbon footprint that even eating produce imported from overseas. Because ruminant animals (cows, bison, sheep, goats) create methane gas and nitrous oxide from their excretions, those greenhouse gases combined with the CO2 produced from grain growth and fuel usage actually add up to WAY a lot more (from this past week's Science Friday on NPR).

Obviously the best thing is still to eat locally grown produce - but it also turns out that if you ate beef and cheese from a local grass-fed cow, you're actually doing an even worse thing than eating corn-fed beef imported from halfway across the country... because grass makes the cow produce MORE methane and NO2.

The suggestions are basically to avoid red meat and cheese as much as possible, and switch to non-ruminant livestock like chickens and pigs and fish for meat. Vat-grown meat would also immediately fix this problem too, but that's a way off.

This makes me really sad, and makes me rethink my penchant for enjoying cheeses imported from France and Italy. Those are actually the worst possible carbon footprint foods I can eat, and that's depressing.

Check out this "food carbon calculator": http://www.eatlowcarbon.org/Carbon-Calculator.html