Water resources aren't even on the chart. Nuts, for example, can use way too much water. Almonds in California are a battle.
this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2026
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Water resources aren't even on the chart. Probably because it's about "greenhouse gas emissions across the supply chain"?
I just grabbed the first three. The real question is, why didn't this data table mention it?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2772427122000560
https://oggardenonline.com/how-might-conserving-water-lower-greenhouse-gas-emissions.html
It's also kind of unfair to go by weight. A kg of beef is way more harmful to the environment, but it's also got a lot more calories and essential to live vitamins and minerals in it than any fruit or vegetable.
this is poore-nemecek 2018. it is not good science.
can you expand on that for those of us who don’t wanna Google and confirmation bias ourselves?
they combine disparately methodized LCA data. this is explicitly against good practice. the fact that they found outrageous disparities got them great headlines and impressive graphs, but the underlying science is questionable at best. I could go deeper but this is the thousand foot view.
It's a meta analysis, so I'm not sure it would be possible to get identical methodologies for all data sets.
of course it's not. Meta analyzes fly in the face of the guidance for LCAs. it's just not good science.
since I'm already being tasked to address this again, it's worth pointing out that poore and nemecek didn't even gather the LCA data themselves. they, themselves, actually cite other meta-analyzes of LCA data. those meta-analyzes do recognize that they are violating best practices in the text themselves, and just go ahead and do it anyway. egregiously, poore and nemecek Don't even acknowledge this faux pas and pass off their "findings" as sound investigation.
To elaborate and give a few exmples, LCA data is highly specific to a single production process, and might cover entirely different things.
There's a huge difference between "one liter of paint from prepared from pigment and solvent" and "Me driving over to get a house sanded and cleaned, then repainted, per square meter of wall". But both are LCA's for painting, but the latter will be much higher.
It can go the other way too. There are also lots of sub-processes that have negative costs. Putting up a new streetlight has a environmental higher cost than replacing one, because replacing one gives you an old streetlight to recycle. You can't just create a pile of "streetlight LCA data" and take the average.
They can even be very time-specific. If I'm sitting on a giant mountain of gravel, I can give you an LCA for your zen garden that's much lower than last year when I had to import gravel from Norway.
Looking at chocolate here, they include lots of land-use-change, which is caused by cocoa farmers expanding and turning trees into cocoa farms. But that's only because they're expanding. The next harvest won't have that change.
I have trouble believing that those giant CO2 spewing cargo ships are so small a factor.
Because you've been fooled by the focus on those ships.
They're not problematic because of their greenhouse emissions. Hauling stuff by sea is very efficient - by greenhouse gas emissions it is more efficient than rail freight. They're problematic because they burn very dirty fuel which releases sulphur dioxide and particulates which are a different kind of pollutant. However, they're released far from human population centres, and their most serious effects are localised, unlike greenhouse emissions, which are global. The environmental problems of cargo ships are there, but they are not the serious, urgent threat to human life that climate change is.
As such, they are a distraction.
Idk but they do carry a lot.
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Makes a great case for plant based alternative meats, which are actually really good now. I was a heavy meat eater, but I swapped out animal beef for impossible beef, and ended up preferring impossible beef in all my recipes.
Jack & Annie's and Quorn are also fantastic options.
Questions for those who can answer them:
1.) What is the difference between "Milk" and "dairy herd" with regards to pollution and land use? Honest question.
2.) I've always wondered, but didn't want to get flamed for asking: What if you have pet chickens? I don't eat them, they live a great chicken life, but I end up with a ton of eggs that I give to people I know. Obviously those eggs are eaten. Does this count as some kind of horrible animal cruelty?
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The dairy herd seems to be about beef from a dairy herd. So still meat, but offset by the fact that milk is produced as well. Not sure how they calculate it, nor have I ever seen beef labelled as that (...granted I also haven't bought any in years), but it makes sense.
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This just seems like a pet with a byproduct to me but maybe someone knows more about the effects of breeding for egg laying on chicken quality of life
I hadn't considered that they would sell the meat from dairy cows, so thanks for that answer. My neighbor has cows but that's the extent of my knowledge on them.
A few of my chickens are basically "mutts", which haven't been bred for anything specific. (we got them from a local who sells chickens, she turned out to know even less than I do about them, though. They're not as healthy as the others and I suspect they are inbred) The rest of them were picked up from a farm supply store and seem to be specific "breeds", I have some easter eggers, some Australorps, a welsummer, a black star, and some rhode island reds. I may not be doing everything right BUT my chickens have a half acre to run around on instead of being locked in a tiny box their entire lives, and the meanest thing any of them have endured is me catching them by the tail feathers before putting them back over the fence.
Chickens are wonderful pets. They eat bugs and poop fertilizer. As a farmer I can tell you your land can sustain chickens, just like it can sustain hundreds of other native birds.
I’m guessing these stats are focusing on a cow farm that cut down a forest versus a cow farm that exists on a prairie. the carbon cycle on most land can handle a certain amount of cows.
I just really hate how these all demonize small scale farmers. Having a couple dozen chickens is much different than having 500,000 chickens. Agricultures byproducts and environmental impacts range widely.
If I buy half a cow from my neighbor, it doesn’t travel, it gets processed locally. The ecological foot print is different than me getting a cow from Brazil.
Having a couple dozen chickens is much different than having 500,000 chickens.
I've felt that but I haven't really put it into words. My flock of modern dinosaurs gets to run around and eat all the ticks while standing in the sun and digging in the dirt. I've never had chickens before these, and the thing that surprised me is that they aren't mindless balls of feathers. They have personalities. They communicate. They make lots of dinosaur noises too.
I like chickens more than people. They are wonderful little beings. They make me so incredibly happy as they run around and peck at each other.
Nature sequesters carbon. If you are farming within the natural limits of your land you shouldn’t be generating much carbon at all.
All these people have a hard time imagining an old timey farming. Pre Industrial Revolution. There are plenty of natural farms around to this day. Tons of farmers, honoring traditional farming practices.
Just going to pitch in real quick. Growing your eggs on site is way better for the environment, since they don't have to be shipped to your grocery store from miles away.
Your chickens, even if you are a pos that doesn't take care of them at all, will still have a better life than in an egg laying factory.
I highly suggest it. I had some for a while. It's surprising how many eggs you end up with as well, you don't need that many and it's easy to give them a nice life.
2.) I’ve always wondered, but didn’t want to get flamed for asking: What if you have pet chickens? I don’t eat them, they live a great chicken life, but I end up with a ton of eggs that I give to people I know. Obviously those eggs are eaten. Does this count as some kind of horrible animal cruelty?
Eh, it depends on how you look at it. Chickens are just domesticated Red Junglefowl, and we've bred them over the last few thousand years to be bigger, (probably tastier), and lay a lot more eggs.
IMO, egg layers and other common breeds are probably perfectly happy and comfortable birds without any 'real' cruelty. The way we've bred them certainly has made them more susceptible to certain health problems and shortened their max lifespan some (compared to their wild ancestors), but my experience with my birds has been that as long as they're healthy, they seem to be perfectly happy with life.
I think of it the same as how we've bred Border Collies into existence. They're very different from their pre-domestication ancestors, but they're also not so severely altered that they have inherent health issues or other severe issues.
Broilers (meat chickens), however are definitely on the crueler side. Those poor things are only meant to convert feed to meat, and the whole living part is probably considered undesirable. Most only need to live somewhere between a month and a year before slaughter, and I imagine if you let them go any longer they'll drop dead from health issues.
I've been reading about meat chickens, and you're pretty much right. They grow for about 8 weeks, and then they're bound for the nugget factory. If you try to keep them after that they aren't healthy or happy at all.
Border collies are cool. Dad has one. We are into archery, and our range is next to the yard where the pup lives. That dog is intent on those arrows. She can't catch one, they're too fast, but she tries every time. She stares at the arrow on the bow, and when we shoot she will take a couple of steps toward the arrow as it flies, and then gives up at stares down the next arrow. She's also fun with radio controlled cars.
Dairy is the farm, milk is the product. As to pollution and land use factory farms will always cause pollution because they squeeze too many animals into an area smaller then they can live in healthily for profitability. (Cows for example need 2 acres per cow in lush lands or 50 acres per cow arid lands).
As for chickens. In my opinion as long as you have at least two chickens (they are social animals), maintain them properly, protect them from predation, keep up with vet visits/vaccinations, and let your chickens out to forage, they are a wonderful addition to a neighborhood. But make sure you read up on egg safety, especially if you plan to share your eggs.
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I don't get the big difference between milk and cheese? It's not even the processing
The tree nuts do, however, demand a shit ton of water.
I guess that it depend on both of the kind of nuts and where they grow. I've heard that Californian almonds require a lot of water, but they grow on the wild on the south of France (so without any irrigation).
Wild caught fish is there, but no wild caught game?
I'm thinking the footprint for that should be quite neutral.
Well, until everyone does it anyway, then the wild game would vanish rather quick.
That's why there's felling permits.
Oh in English that's more to do with trees, but shortly for moose for instance, the government maintains data and dishes out how many can/should be shot, and then those permits are given out to hunting clubs. You can't just go shooting any animal, willy nilly.
pig superiority
Kentucky fried fuck that. Chicken ftw.
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