Every food choice is a comparison, but the comparisons people actually make are usually missing the numbers. Is oat milk really better than almond? Does chicken get you most of the climate benefit of going vegan? Is a plant-based burger worth it when the beef one is grass-fed? These pages line the options up side by side on the measures that matter and let the arithmetic speak.

Each comparison covers greenhouse gas emissions, land use, freshwater use and eutrophication per kilogram of food or per litre of drink, then adds the parts that a footprint table cannot hold: nutrition, cost, taste, culinary use and welfare. A food can win on carbon and lose on water — almond milk is the classic case — and pretending otherwise would make these pages less useful, not more persuasive.

The headline finding across the whole dataset is consistent and worth stating plainly: the gap between animal and plant foods dwarfs the gap between any two plant foods. Choosing lentils over beef changes your footprint by an order of magnitude; choosing oat over almond changes it at the margin. Both are worth knowing, in that order.

The numbers behind every comparison — Median global life-cycle values per kilogram of product, from the Poore & Nemecek dataset. They set the scale that the individual comparison pages work within.

The numbers behind every comparison
Food	kg CO₂e per kg	Land use (m² per kg)	Freshwater withdrawals (L per kg)
Beef (beef herd)	60	164	1,451
Lamb and mutton	24	185	1,803
Cheese	21	88	5,605
Farmed prawns	12	2	3,515
Pork	7	11	1,796
Poultry	6	7	660
Eggs	4.5	6	578
Tofu	3	2	149
Peas	0.9	7	397
Nuts	0.4	13	4,134

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How to read a food comparison honestly

Footprint numbers are easy to misuse. These caveats keep the comparisons on these pages defensible.

Per kilogram is not per portion or per gram of protein. Cheese and beef look worse per portion still; leafy vegetables can look worse per calorie.
Medians hide a wide spread. The highest-impact beef producers emit many times what the lowest do — but even the best beef is worse than the average legume.
Transport is usually a rounding error. For most foods, production dominates and “local” matters far less than “what” — the exception is anything air-freighted.
Water impact splits into withdrawals and scarcity-weighted use. Almonds are a modest carbon story and a serious water story in drought-exposed regions.
Grass-fed is not automatically lower-carbon. Slower-growing cattle usually emit more methane per kilogram, though land and welfare outcomes can differ.
Nutrition belongs in the comparison. A drink with a third of the protein is not simply a like-for-like replacement, whatever the footprint says.

Using these comparisons to change what you buy

1
Deal with the big items first
Beef, lamb and cheese account for most of the average diet's food footprint. One substitution there beats a dozen careful choices further down the table.
2
Pick your second axis
Once the animal-versus-plant question is settled, choose between plant options on whatever you care about most: water, land, nutrition, cost or taste.
3
Check the nutrition column
Match protein, calcium and B12 when you replace a staple, especially with plant milks — fortified soy is the closest nutritional analogue to dairy.
4
Re-run the comparison for your own portions
Convert per-kilogram figures to the amount you actually eat in a week. That is the number that tells you whether a change is worth making.

Sources: Poore & Nemecek (Science, 2018), FAO, USDA FoodData Central, Mekonnen & Hoekstra (2011).

Questions people ask about food comparisons

Which plant milk is best overall?

Soy, on balance. It has the lowest combined footprint of the mainstream options once water and land are included, and it is the only common plant milk with protein comparable to dairy. Oat is close behind and better for coffee foam; almond uses the most water; rice has the highest carbon of the common plant milks and is still far below cow's milk.

Is chicken a good enough compromise?

It is a real improvement on beef — roughly a tenfold cut in emissions per kilogram — and a small one on plants, at around six times the footprint of legumes. On welfare grounds it goes the other way: because birds are small, a chicken-based diet involves far more animals killed per kilogram of meat than a beef-based one.

Are plant-based meat alternatives actually better for the planet?

Yes, substantially. Peer-reviewed life-cycle assessments of the major brands find roughly 90% lower greenhouse gas emissions and land use than beef, and they compare favourably with chicken and pork too. Nutritionally they are a mixed bag: less saturated fat and more fibre, but often more sodium.

Does local and seasonal beat plant-based?

Rarely. Transport accounts for a small share of most foods' emissions, so a local steak still has a much larger footprint than imported lentils. Local and seasonal is a genuine improvement within a category — it just cannot close the gap between categories.

Where do these figures come from and how current are they?

Primarily Poore & Nemecek's 2018 meta-analysis in Science, covering about 38,000 farms across 119 countries, supplemented by national dietary and life-cycle data. They are global medians, so your regional figures will differ — the ordering between foods is far more stable than the absolute values.

Method and sources

Environmental figures come from Poore & Nemecek (2018), “Reducing food's environmental impacts through producers and consumers”, Science 360(6392), as compiled by Our World in Data. Nutrition values come from national food composition databases. Prices are indicative and vary by market.

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