The developing world graphic is probably a sign of something positive -- poverty is receding in the developing world, and people are able to get themselves meat more often.

I should also say that I appreciate the correct application of utilitarianism in the analysis of beef vs. chicken from an animal rights perspective.

How is the death toll between chicken and beef calculated? Is the death toll disparity related to salmonella et al or the long-term consequences of eating red meat exaggerated?

What Neil said -- there is vastly -- VASTLY -- more suffering in every chicken meal than in beef.

See this:
http://tinyurl.com/6hoyb4
For more details

One note, one question:

It might also be necessary to compare the carbon footprint of the final, edible foodstuff, and not just the products listed here. Milk, cheese, carrots, tomatoes, oat flakes, and possibly salmon are ready-to-eat without further carbon input. Everything else needs to be cooked, unless you really like beefsteak tartare or carpaccio.

And the question: does anyone know how eggs measure up?

One obvious point. A lot of of these foods vary in water content. Milk is mostly water. 8 oz of milk has the same amount of protein as an oz of cheese. Similarly veggies have more water than grains. And so on. A better comparison would be emissions per calorie. I think in the chicken cheese comparison cheese would end up even worse than in current graph, but milk would end up about the same as cheese.

What Neil said -- there is vastly -- VASTLY -- more suffering in every chicken meal than in beef.

Yep. If you're going to insist on eating meat, blue whales provide by far the most bang for your suffering buck.

So which is better to eat, chicken or beef?

> does anyone know how eggs measure up?

They come before the chicken.

Gar beat me to it, calorie content is the zeroth order meaningful comparision. Which, very roughly (with the help on an online calorie counter) gives pounds of C02 per 1000 calories as:
Milk 3.3
Cheese 5.9
Chicken 2.4
Pork 8.8
Salmon 12.5
Shrimp 24.9
Beef 25.0
Oat Flakes 0.4
Flour 0.3
Carrots 1.4
Tomatoes 20.3

Not many changes in the meat vs non-meat, though cheese improves (which is important) and tomatoes are shown up for the evil carbon-consuming monsters they are.

Of course, even this zeroth order analysis is pretty stupid. What one should do is define a vector of basic nutrients (protein, carbs, fat, vitamins, minerals etc.) for each food type and ask what is the minimal carbon impact required to meet recommended daily amounts. Without doing the calculation it's hard to guess, but I strongly suspect that the carbon calculus would change dramatically.

(Or, for those of you who prefer more precise statments, we seek the vector P_j such that:
C(P_j) is minimised
while meeting the constraint
N_{ij}P_j=R_i
where P_j is a vector with the j'th entry as pounds of the j'th food stuff, C(P_j) is the carbon cost of the foods P_j, N_{ij} is a matrix with the ij'th entry giving the amount of type i nutrient for type j food and R_i is a vector who's i'th entry is the recommended amount of nutrient i.)

It's rather inconvenient that eating nothing but oats, flour, and carrots would kill you, and in general a high-carbohydrate, low protein diet has been shown to be distinctly unhealthy and one of the leading causes of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes.

It's rather inconvenient that eating nothing but oats, flour, and carrots would kill you, and in general a high-carbohydrate, low protein diet has been shown to be distinctly unhealthy and one of the leading causes of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes.

Umm. Far be it from me to point this out, but the chart is hardly an exhaustive list of the vegetables that are available. Things like legumes, potatoes, squash also exist, and they all probably have carbon footprints much more like carrots than like beef. It's very possible to have a good balance of protein, fat, and carbohydrate on a vegetarian or vegan diet.

Also, not sure what country you're living in, but it certainly seems like it would be difficult to characterize the American diet as "low protein"...

Neat stuff -- but this only puts the carbon argument at odds with *equivocators* in the animal rights movement. Vive la gazpacho!

Comparing calories is also pretty silly, given that people in a position to affect their emissions behavior will necessarily not be eating a subsistence diet. That means we're not constructing a new diet from scratch with no attention paid to variety and nutrient content. Under calorie accounting, low-calorie foods like tomatoes end up looking awful. We don't need people to start thinking they ought to substitute pork for tomatoes.

Weighting these figures by serving size or (less problematically) per capita consumption may be more appropriate. After all, the current state of affairs is what we're looking for hints on improving. People need to know what they're doing that's *actually* causing carbon emissions.

Also, regarding the utilitarian argument: the cow/chicken thing presumes we're not weighting animal suffering by probably level of consciousness. I think that's a mistake -- most people would intuitively agree that killing a shrimp is less morally problematic than killing a dog. The immediate temptation is then to find where that cutoff line exists; but a continuum is probably a more appropriate response. Ask any farmer and they'll tell you they feel a lot better about killing chickens than they do about killing pigs (if they have an opinion one way or another, that is).

And yes, anthropomorphism does complicate matters. And yes, this line of thinking taken too far can lead to some pretty odious sociological conclusions. Let's just agree to not do that and keep eating fish, ok?

I'm with Adrock, wondering about eggs. They seem like a major dietary item, and I wonder where they fall in this analysis.

Here's another obvious point: it depends what it's wrapped in.

Last time I looked, the wrapping on a steak was pretty parsimonious compared, oh, I don't know, to a box of Grape Nuts.

Surely, packaging counts.

i'm assuming that the salmon is farmed salmon, correct?

There are some extremely dubious assumptions about how carbon costs get charged; beef is high because carbon release from deforestation in the Amazon is "costed" to beef. There is, however, no causal requirement in beef production that this need be the way to produce it. It is a real problem for certain, but one does need to pay some attention to the origin of the numbers and the assumptions behind them.

What is the deal with the extraordinarily high shrimp figures? In other wirds, why so high?

Another way that this system of measurement could be improved is by including methane emissions made by cows. I'm not sure the data really exists because methane emissions are hard to measure and vary depending on the cow's diet, but including this would put beef way out ahead of everything else even more.

The suffering-per-meal of chicken goes way way down if you eat local birds from a farm with a clue. It doesn't take that much in terms of land or effort to raise a chicken decently. You can get them nearly anywhere in the US without too much trouble, they're not much more expensive than factory-farm chickens from the supermarket, and they taste a lot better than the creepy-insipid Tyson or Perdue birds.

the cow/chicken thing presumes we're not weighting animal suffering by probably level of consciousness. I think that's a mistake -- most people would intuitively agree that killing a shrimp is less morally problematic than killing a dog.

Agreed. I avoid pork almost entirely, beef substantially, and eat a lot of chicken. I don't particularly care about the carbon footprint of my meals, but do care about how the animals that I eat are treated. But I weigh the well-being of mammals much more heavily than I do fish or fowl.

It seems to me that, intuitively, sessile molluscs ought to be the best animals to eat from an animal welfare-utilitarian and carbon footprint standpoint. I know that things like abalone, mussels, etc, can be farmed, but they seem to retain a very high price nonetheless (I think.).

I eat the hell out of sessile mollusks.

The big shocker for me was how much beef stood out from other meats, but if Marc and Mark are correct, these figures reflect a lot of possibly dodgy decisions about what to count and not to count and should be taken with a grain of salt (carbon cost per ounce very low, AFAIK, but per calorie infinite).

That and tomatoes, but you can have my tomatoes when you pry them from my cold dead hands. Although again this may reflect the assumptions that went into the chart - it says "tomatoes, greenhouse", so how representative is that of other forms of tomatoes? If a lot of the cost is the high-speed shipping necessary to deliver the tomatoes in a fresh condition, are canned tomatoes better? Or are they worse if we don't reuse the cans? Would it help to switch to reusable retail-food containers that are returned (for a deposit) to be cleaned and refilled, like those giant bottled-water bottles?

"It's rather inconvenient that eating nothing but oats, flour, and carrots would kill you..."

Nonsense. My horse is 28 and still healthy as ever. :)

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