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By Matthew Rees

Food and Health Fact #77: Eating local and greenhouse gas emissions

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An oft-heard tenet of environmental protection is to “eat local.” But as Our World in Data has pointed out, greenhouse gas emissions from transportation “make up a very small amount of the emissions from food.” Much more important than where one’s food comes from is what food is being consumed. The carbon footprint of animal products is typically much larger than that of plant-based products. Beef, for example, generates 60 kilograms of greenhouse gas emissions for every one kilogram produced (according to a 2018 paper in Science by two Oxford University professors), while nuts, citrus fruits, apples, and root vegetables all generate less than 0.5 kilograms of emissions for every kilogram produced.