Isn't local meat better for the planet than imported plants?

The objection

“Food miles matter. Beef from the farm down the road must beat lentils shipped across an ocean.”

The answer

It sounds right, and the impulse to support local farmers and cut transport is a decent one. The arithmetic kills it anyway.

Transport is less than 10% of emissions for most foods, and for many it is a rounding error. The bulk of a food’s footprint, typically more than 80%, comes from land-use change and on-farm processes like enteric fermentation, fertiliser and manure. For beef, transport is about 0.5% of the total. Shipping beef roughly 9,000 km by sea adds around 0.2 kg CO2eq per kg, against a total footprint of roughly 60 kg CO2eq per kg. The journey is noise. The cow is the signal.

So locally produced beef generates far more emissions than plant foods shipped halfway round the world. Peas, lentils and tofu sit at a small fraction of beef’s footprint after long-distance transport. As Our World in Data puts it: focus on what you eat, not where it came from.

There is one genuine exception. Air-freighted produce, some out-of-season asparagus and berries, carries a real transport penalty. But that argues against air freight rather than for local meat, and air freight moves only about 0.16% of global food tonne-kilometres. Nearly everything travels by sea.

Local meat is a comforting story. The carbon ledger says the kind of food on your plate outweighs the distance it travelled by two orders of magnitude.