Isn't buying local more important than going vegan?
Short answer: No. Transport is only about 5% of food's emissions. What you eat dwarfs how far it travelled, local beef still beats nothing.
Transport is a sliver. Land use change and on-farm production dominate, which is why what you eat matters far more than how far it came.
Poore & Nemecek (2018); Our World in Data
The objection
“I buy local. Cutting food miles does more for the planet than some imported tofu shipped across the world.”
The answer
It feels obvious that distance equals damage, and it’s almost entirely wrong. Transport accounts for only about 5% of food’s greenhouse gas emissions [1][2]. The overwhelming majority comes from what happens on the farm: land clearing, methane, fertiliser, the animal itself. How far your dinner travelled is a rounding error next to what your dinner is.
The numbers are stark. A kilogram of beef emits around 60 kg of CO₂-equivalent; a kilogram of peas, about 1 kg [2]. Now imagine you buy that beef from the farm next door and carry it home on foot, with zero transport. Its footprint is still roughly 59.8 kg. Eliminating the food miles entirely barely moves it.
So the local advice can actively backfire. Someone who swaps imported lentils for local beef to “cut food miles” has multiplied their footprint many times over [2]. The thing that travelled across an ocean by ship (and almost all food goes by sea, not air) arrives with a tiny transport cost attached.
There is one real exception. The small share of food flown by air, some highly perishable items, is genuinely transport-heavy. But that’s a fraction of a fraction.
Choose what you eat, not where it came from. Local is a fine bonus once you’ve made the choice that matters, and that choice is on the plate, not the map.