According to one study released last week, your answer doesn’t matter much: even if you walk to the burger joint, your food will have its own set of wheels—and an exhaust pipe.
While it’s now common knowledge that activities like driving conventional cars cause global warming, the environmental impact of what we eat continues to slip under the mainstream radar. The study, performed by Germany’s Institute for Ecological Economy Research, could change this with its comprehensive and comprehensible findings.
Instead of measuring the impact of diets with pounds or kilograms of carbon or methane produced in food manufacturing, the researchers have reduced their results to numbers that reflect the distance driven in a mid-sized car that would produce the same amount of greenhouse gas over the course of a year. They took into account the energy used to produce feed for livestock, all transportation involved in the process, and even the methane produced by animals themselves. The results are familiar: vegetarians and vegans, well… drive less.
Following an omnivorous diet for one year is comparable to driving 2,956 miles. Meanwhile, vegetarians travel half as far at 1,508 miles, and vegans rank a mere 391 miles. Furthermore, a plant-based diet consisting entirely of organic foods is equivalent to only 175 miles traveled—less than the free daily mileage limit on a ZipCar. For perspective, the average American drives around 12,000 miles each year.
While an omnivorous diet heavy on organic foods certainly reduces the toll on the planet’s odometer, the researchers insist that the production of beef and milk—organic or not—ought to be curtailed.
Photo: Flickr
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Alex Felsinger
Alex is primarily concerned with animal welfare, wildlife conservation, and environmental justice. As a freelance writer in San Francisco, he leads a deliberately simplistic and thrifty lifestyle, yet still can’t help gawking at the newest green gadgets and zero-emission concept cars.
4 Responses to How Far Would You Drive for a Cheeseburger?
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This is one of the reason I have cut all beef from my diet and planted my own vegetable garden. Now me and my wife eat home grown vegetables and our meat comes from deer that I harvest myself.
Awesome post and thanks for citing the study. I’m going to check that out.
[...] Posted by karmalily on September 2, 2008 From Planetsave: [...]
Just another reason to eat locally grown produce as well. An orange or banana produces its fair share of pollutants to travel to the midwestern US. Locally grown foods offer the additional benefits of reduced transportation costs plus (at least where I live) you can often go directly to the farm to harvest them yourself.