More on food

Dr. Boehm at the University of Connecticut writes that the diet of the average household creates as much greenhouse gas emissions every week as would a drive from DC to Trenton, NJ. The main culprit? Meat and dairy, as the last blog noted, but that's not all. Refrigerated trucks that transport melons and other vegetables also contribute a lot of CO2 (or CO2 equivalent) to the atmosphere.

The news article summary of the scholarly work kind of goes off the rails there, and I'm not going to follow it: something about thinking about how processed your food is, though sometimes that's important and other times not. Bottom line: minimize meats and dairy, as we've noted before, but also watch out for things transported cold!

Meat & climate change

The Guardian writes about the environmental impact of a variety of sources of protein, finding that peas are the least costly option environmentally speaking, while beef- particularly in deforested areas- is the most expensive variety. Note that poultry and fish are remarkably similar in costs, as we discussed a few weeks ago. Also, the article says that cattle eating natural pastures are the low end of the graph here, which is a heck of a lot better than the high end. Still, even the best beef is worse than any pork, poultry, fish, eggs, or plant sources....