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Comment by lyle_nel | Hacker News Reader

Emissions of CO2 on its own does not necessarily imply that there is a carbon footprint.

Besides the carbon footprint of transporting food, the food we consume is carbon neutral since the carbon in the food comes from the atmosphere. Therefore the CO2 gas we expel is mostly carbon neutral.

Cars are a different story since their carbon originates from ancient reserves(oil and coal) that has long since been removed from the carbon cycle. This carbon is now reintroduced to the carbon cycle, thus leading to a positive carbon footprint.

Put differently, if our food we eat consisted of carbon extracted from oil or coal, then we would be adding CO2 to the current carbon cycle, thus leading to a positive carbon footprint. However this is not true.

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Oh but there's so much more energy in your food. There's the energy that went into producing fertilizer, energy to make pesticides, energy burned to run tractors, energy to process the harvest into what you get in the grocery store, potentially more energy involved in packaging. For plastic packaging, there's the oil used to make the carbon-rich polymers. Etc.

Just like cars, all of that energy comes from burning fossil fuels. The only way you'll find carbon neutral foods is if you walk out in the woods, pick it off a wild plant, and eat it right there.

Generally, the total energy that goes into producing and transporting something is called "embodied energy." It's not necessarily 1:1 related with carbon footprint since it can hypothetically come from renewable energy instead of fossil fuels, but it's a very related concept.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_energy

Most of what you just said would actually reflect pretty badly on vegan diet values and improve paleo diet values.

Vegan diets are the product of intensive agriculture basically anywhere in the world. Paleo, depending on country, can be pretty low intensity, for instance, in Argentina where cattle roams free in the grassland.

While I easily concede that in places like most of the USA - where cattle is a product of intensive livestock exploitation - a paleo diet will produce a lot of CO2 compared to a vegan diet, that is actually not true in places like Argentina, or, to a lesser degree, in places like southern Europe.

Indeed, I did not take all of the above mentioned things into account.

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