Your Thanksgiving Meal’s Climate Impact, in 4 Charts

No matter what you serve on Thanksgiving, food is at the heart of the holiday. But perhaps especially on Thanksgiving, the meal is about more than sustenance. It’s a place for conversations of all kinds, including, maybe, an opportunity to learn about the climate impact of the food on your plate. What you learn might surprise you. Take this data point: the dish with the highest carbon footprint isn’t the meat, but the mac n cheese.

We crunched the emissions numbers on different types of Thanksgiving meals and foods using data from several sources, including a 2019 study in Science. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the vegan meal comes in with the lowest carbon footprint (it’s also the best for animal welfare, among other impacts, but we just looked at greenhouse gas emissions here). 

Foods that are already vegan, like beans, sweet potatoes and corn are all very climate-friendly options. In total, a vegan dinner with tofurkey and vegan macaroni and cheese has only 28 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions of the turkey dinner. And those emissions remain low even with an additional dish, and more food by weight, than the other two meals.

One bit of good news for all of the meals — at least for climate — is that the biggest driver of food-related emissions, beef, is not served at most Thanksgiving tables. The centerpiece in an omnivore meal is of course usually a turkey, but meat isn’t the only food driving up emissions here.

The vegetarian feast has 88 percent of the emissions of the omnivorous feast — in other words, not much lower. As we mentioned, the single dish with the highest carbon footprint is not the meat — it’s the mac n cheese, at nearly 1.8 kilograms of CO2, thanks to the dairy. Swapping out the dairy mac n cheese for a vegan version — with creaminess coming from cashews instead — can save over 1.6 kilograms of CO2.

Cheese, and dairy in general, comes with a heavier carbon footprint than many other animal-sourced proteins, because it comes from cows. Cows, as ruminant animals with a powerful digestive system, burp lots of methane (beef is even higher because, on top of the burps, you’ve got a lot of land use thanks to pasture and feed crops). Dairy production also requires more freshwater and land. 

Foods sourced from poultry, like turkey meat or eggs, tend to be lower in emissions as animal-sourced foods go, because chickens and turkeys can be raised without a lot of land or feed. So poultry meat and eggs are more “climate-friendly” — but that comes with an ethical tradeoff, as chickens and other farmed birds have some of the worst animal welfare conditions in the food system.

If all of this data seems overwhelming, keep in mind that each choice makes a difference. Everything on your plate has a cost — to climate, water, land, animals and workers, to name a few — but each choice is also an opportunity to do better.

Sources

Poore and Nemecek 2018, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaq0216 

CarbonCloud, https://apps.carboncloud.com/climatehub/ 

Flysjö 2011, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022030211006187 

Notes on Data

Figures include agricultural impacts only, based on the environmental impacts of the raw ingredients. They do not include environmental impacts from food processing, packaging, transport (“food miles”) or cooking. Results will be more accurate for less processed foods. Agricultural impacts account for around 71 percent of food emissions. 

Greenhouse gas emissions data from Poore and Nemecek is based on IPCC 2013 and includes climate feedbacks. Average (mean) impact values are used. In reality, values can fall over a wide range. For example, poultry meat (i.e. chicken and turkey) can emit from four to 20.8 kilograms of CO2 per kilogram of meat, depending on how and where the animal is raised. But as a general rule, animal-derived foods have a considerably higher impact on the planet than plant-based foods.

Data is per portion, with portion size based on published recipes, with some simplification to make recipes more comparable between vegan, vegetarian and omnivorous versions and to omit minor ingredients — such as some herbs, spices, seasonings or other flavorings. Portion sizes are generous — this is a Thanksgiving feast! Impacts are calculated based on raw food weights. In portion size calculations, allowance has been made for evaporation during cooking. Quantities will vary in real life. Environmental impacts per portion depend on portion size: the more you eat, the bigger an impact it will have.

Not all sustainability issues are captured in this data. For example, palm oil can have a high environmental footprint if it is grown on recently deforested rainforest land.