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Does eating local meat really beat imported vegan food for the environment?

  • Writer: Emanuele Bortolotto
    Emanuele Bortolotto
  • Jul 26
  • 8 min read

Updated: Sep 7


Sometimes your mind wanders. Maybe you think about your celebrity crush. Maybe you think about the ending of the not at all controversial ending of the seriess "Game of Thrones". Me? I’m thinking about the environmental impact of a bean. Specifically, a bean that has traveled a very long way to get to me. This thought was triggered by a scene I witnessed in the supermarket earlier today. It was a small, quiet debate between two shoppers that I believe is a perfect microcosm of one of the most persistent and misleading ideas in the world of sustainable eating.

One shopper was holding a plastic-wrapped package of beef from a local farm, less than 50 kilometers away. He held it with an air of profound virtue. The other shopper was holding a bag of quinoa from Bolivia and a couple of avocados from Peru. She held them with an air of quiet, cosmopolitan guilt. "At least mine is local," said the beef-buyer, with a confident nod. "Think of the food miles." The avocado-buyer just sighed, defeated by this seemingly unassailable logic.

This "common sense" argument—that local food is always the best choice for the environment—is everywhere. It feels right, doesn't it? Buying from your neighbor must be better than buying from another continent. But as an investigator, I've learned that when something feels too simple and too obvious, it's often completely wrong. So I decided to launch a full-scale investigation. Does eating local meat really beat imported vegan food for the environment? 🧐


The Cult of Local: Deconstructing the Food Miles Myth


Before I get into the data, I want to acknowledge that the "locavore" movement comes from a wonderful place. It’s a movement that encourages supporting local farmers, strengthening community ties, eating seasonally, and having a deeper connection to the food you eat. These are all, without question, good things. The problem is that somewhere along the way, the entire conversation about sustainable eating got hijacked by one single, dramatically overrated metric: food miles.

We developed a collective obsession with the distance our food traveled, as if the carbon footprint of a banana was directly proportional to the number of stamps on its passport. ✈️ This led to the powerful and persistent myth that the most important environmental decision you can make at the supermarket is to buy the thing that grew closest to your house.

My investigation revealed that this is a catastrophic miscalculation. To understand why, we have to look at a process called a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). I like to think of an LCA as a full, and often quite invasive, background check on your food. It doesn't just ask for the food's current address (where you bought it) or its place of birth (where it was grown). It investigates its entire life, from cradle to grave. It asks:

  • How much land was cleared to make way for it?

  • What kind of machinery was used on the farm?

  • How much fertilizer was applied?

  • What did it eat?

  • And, most importantly in the case of some foods, how much did it burp? 💨

My editor, manu, and I often talk about the importance of tackling these "common sense" arguments that feel right but are scientifically wrong. And the food miles myth is the undisputed king of them all.


The Elephant in the Field: What Actually Makes Up a Food's Carbon Footprint?


When you actually perform a Life Cycle Assessment, you discover something shocking. For most foods, the emissions from transportation—the "food miles"—are a tiny, almost insignificant fraction of the total greenhouse gas emissions.

Thanks to the incredible work of researchers Joseph Poore and Thomas Nemecek at the University of Oxford, who conducted the most comprehensive analysis of global food systems ever, we have a clear picture of where the emissions come from. I’ve spent days looking at their data, visualized beautifully by Our World in Data, and the results are staggering.


Land Use Change (The Bulldozer Factor ủi)


This is a huge one. When a forest, with its rich soil and ancient trees, is cleared to create a pasture for cattle or to grow animal feed, a massive amount of carbon is released into the atmosphere. This single act of land conversion is a catastrophic source of emissions before a single cow has even been born.


The Farm Stage (The Burp Factor 🐮)


This is the main event, the undisputed heavyweight champion of food emissions. For plant foods, this includes emissions from fertilizer production (which is very energy-intensive) and farm machinery. For animals, it includes those things, plus a much more potent source: their own biology.


  • Methane (CH4): Ruminant animals like cows and sheep have a special digestive system that allows them to eat grass. A byproduct of this system is methane, which they burp out. Methane is a greenhouse gas over 80 times more potent at trapping heat than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. A single cow is like a furry, four-legged bioreactor, constantly emitting a super-potent greenhouse gas.

  • Nitrous Oxide (N2O): Animal manure releases nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas that is nearly 300 times more potent than CO2.


Transport (The Boat Factor 🚢)


And what about the food miles? It turns out that this is, for most foods, a tiny sliver of the overall footprint. Why? Because the vast majority of international food transport does not happen on airplanes; it happens on massive, incredibly efficient cargo ships. While a plane has a huge carbon footprint, a cargo ship can carry an enormous amount of food, making the emissions per kilogram of product very, very small. My research shows that for beef, transport typically accounts for less than 1% of its total emissions. For most food products, it’s less than 10%.

The production emissions are so enormous that the tiny whisper of transport emissions at the end makes almost no difference to the final result.


A Tale of Two Dinners: Putting the Numbers to the Test


To make this crystal clear, let's go back to our shoppers in Helsinki and investigate the full life story of their chosen meals.


Dinner #1: The Local Steak 🥩


Our first shopper buys a kilogram of beef from a farm 50km away. The transport emissions from the truck that brought it to the store are negligible. But what about the rest of its life? That kilogram of beef required a huge amount of land to graze on. It required a huge amount of feed (like soy and corn), which had to be grown, harvested, and transported. And over its lifetime, the cow it came from spent every single day burping a steady stream of powerful methane into the atmosphere. The final result, according to the Oxford data, is that even the lowest-impact local beef is responsible for around 20-30 kilograms of CO2-equivalents per kilogram of product.


Dinner #2: The Imported Tofu Stir-fry 🍚


Our second shopper buys a kilogram of tofu, made from soybeans grown in Brazil. She also buys some rice from Thailand and some broccoli from Spain. Every single ingredient has traveled thousands of miles on a cargo ship. But what about their production? Growing plants is an incredibly efficient process. It uses a fraction of the land and water, and it doesn't involve any methane-burping animals. The result? The total carbon footprint for her entire, globally-sourced meal, including transport, is around 2-3 kilograms of CO2-equivalents.

Even if the tofu had to take a private jet and a limousine to get to the supermarket, its carbon footprint would still be lower than the local beef. The emissions from the cow's burps are just that massive.

Here is a simple table I’ve compiled from the Our World in Data visualizations of the Poore & Nemecek study, showing the average greenhouse gas emissions per kilogram of food product.

Food Product

Greenhouse Gas Emissions (kg CO₂eq per kg of product)

Beef (Beef Herd)

~60 kg

Lamb & Mutton

~24 kg

Cheese

~21 kg

Chicken

~6 kg

Pork

~7 kg

Tofu

~2 kg

Peas

~0.9 kg

Nuts

~0.3 kg

The difference is not small. It is a chasm.


Questions from the Internet



Questions from the Internet: "Okay, but what about my avocados and almonds? I heard they're environmental nightmares!"


This is a great and important question. It's true that not all plants are created equal. Almonds, for example, have a very high water footprint and have been linked to problems with bee populations in California. Avocados can also be water-intensive and have been associated with deforestation in some regions. It is important to be a conscious consumer of these products. However, when we are talking specifically about greenhouse gas emissions, their footprint is still vastly smaller than any animal product. The average carbon footprint of avocados is around 2.5 kg CO₂eq per kg, and for almonds it's around 4.1 kg CO₂eq per kg. This is still a world away from the 60 kg for beef or 21 kg for cheese.


Questions from the Internet: "So you're saying eating local is pointless?"


No, not at all! My investigation is not an attack on the concept of eating local. Buying local food is a fantastic way to support your local economy, support small farmers, build community, and eat fresh, seasonal produce. These are all incredibly valuable things. 👍

However, if your primary and overriding goal is to reduce your carbon footprint and combat climate change, then eating local is one of the least effective things you can do. The science is crystal clear: what you eat is vastly more important than where it comes from. Swapping beef for beans has a much bigger climate impact than swapping a Californian carrot for a local one. The only major exception is for foods that are air-freighted, like out-of-season berries or asparagus. Air-freight has a huge carbon footprint, and in these rare cases, buying local (or just waiting until the food is in season) is a much better choice.


Internal Link Break!


The entire "local meat" argument is often an attempt to find a loophole in the overwhelming data about the environmental impact of animal agriculture. For a full, unvarnished look at that data and the larger question of our food system's role in the climate crisis, you can read my investigation here: [Can Veganism Save the Planet?] 🌍


The Conclusion: It's the Cow, Not the Car


So, after this deep dive into the complex world of Life Cycle Assessments, does eating local meat really beat imported vegan food for the environment?

My investigation leads me to a clear and definitive conclusion: no. Not even close. It is a comforting, but scientifically unsupported, myth. The idea that the carbon footprint of your dinner is determined by the distance it traveled is one of the most persistent and distracting red herrings in the sustainable eating debate.

The environmental impact of food is overwhelmingly determined by what happens at the farm, not what happens on the road or the sea. The methane from the cow will always be more significant than the fuel from the cargo ship.

If you want to reduce the environmental impact of your diet, the solution is not to obsessively check the passport of your vegetables. The solution is to eat fewer animals. It’s that simple, and that profound. ✅



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