Thanks nattles for the linkage
It’s really pretty, but if this chart shows “car miles driven” for each of these foods, I’m curious how it’s being calculated. It appears to be standardized in terms of weight, so lentils and lamb are on equal footing there. All it should be comparing, if I understand correctly, is how much energy is expended bringing each item to market. (Correct me if I’m wrong.)
In which case, this chart doesn’t appear to take into account differences in regional availability. At least here in Chicago, I’d guess most tomatoes actually have a higher carbon footprint than beef or cheese, since most of the non-heirloom organic tomatoes are being shipped in from Florida. In North America, lentils appear to be mostly farmed in Canada (Saskatchewan, in particular). That’s a long drive from here, much farther than the average block of Wisconsin cheese or roughly as far as Texas-raised beef. (Most of our lamb comes from overseas, so it’s not surprising that it’s high on this list.)
But wait, they’re talking about greenhouse gases produced by each item, and confusingly converting that into car miles (what kind of car? What sort of MPG does this car get? Why a car instead of a semi?). So OK, it makes sense that beef takes more energy to produce than lentils. But how does milk rate so low? Dairy cows take up a lot of energy, and produce greenhouse gas themselves. And why is cheese so much higher than yogurt and milk?
Don’t look to the legends next to each item to answer these questions. They’re full of lifestyle recommendations, rather than an explanation of the data. You have to go to a different page to find out how they’ve worked all this out, and you still might be confused. The “cradle to grave” “life cycle assessment” oddly includes “confined feedlots” as part of the death cycle — um, again, how does milk rate so low, then? Apparently inhumane treatment of animals is given far more weight in the assessment than the massive amount of pesticides and fertilizers used by the soybean industry, which is how tofu, an industrial processed product, rates so low on this chart — and why the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico created by fertilizer runoff isn’t a factor. Instead, the chart recommends choosing organic to “avoid GMOs.” Not poisoning our waters.
It’s really easy to blame meat for ecological problems, but there are so many problems with the way we grow produce, too. Fluff-filled pseudoscientific charts aren’t solving anything.
