Comment by jakewins | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jakewins | Hacker News Reader

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You're right, it's a poor example. I guess I was thinking of tomato pastas and tomato soups, for instance.

A better one, like you mention, is rice - again a crop with substantially worse carbon impact than chicken.

Fruits are even more complex - if you get them in season, locally and actually eat them, they are fantastic. If you buy them out of season, due to their short shelf-life you'll find they are often air shipped and have outsize waste at the retail level. Avocado is a good example here, water issues aside. In season they have a small impact, out of season they are air-shipped from South America to the rest of the world.

My point being: There are large and non-obvious differences, and they do not clearly align with traditional diets.

> A better one, like you mention, is rice - again a crop with substantially worse carbon impact than chicken.

Do you have a source for that? The data at [0] indicates that chicken is about 50% worse than rice in terms of CO2e per Calorie. In fact, chicken is worse than every vegan food listed there except for broccoli, which has very few Calories to begin with.

[0] https://sustainability.stackexchange.com/questions/5883/why-...

AFAIK, the problem with rice is methane not CO2.

That’s accurate. But the data cited in the page I linked is based on CO2 equivalent, which accounts for the higher global warming potential of other gases, including methane. I suspect that the high global warming potential of methane is the main reason that rice is more impactful than the other non-animal-based foods.

Prepared tomato products are not made from greenhouse tomatoes.

They are made from varieties that taste good and they are picked ripe instead of for shipping.

For cooking, canned tomatoes are usually better than fresh store tomatoes. The fresh ones are for salads or whatever.

Meat is also shipped across the world a lot, like every other food. So the impact of transportation adds up to the impact of production, which is huge.

It's precisely because feeding humans is so resource-intensive that we should not waste so many resources feeding animals.

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