Perhaps understandably, maintaining calorie intake but completely shifting to healthy foods increased energy use by 43 percent, water use by 16 percent, and emissions by 11 percent.
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According to Telegraph, other vegetables that are slightly better than lettuce are cabbages which produce 1/5 of emissions per calorie compared to pork.
Other vegetables such as cucumbers, eggplant and celery place a more severe strain on the environment’s limited resources in comparison with chicken or pork meat, while broccoli, Brussels sprouts, carrots and onions are less damaging.
Reducing the number of calories consumed, without changing the proportion of meat and other food types, cut combined emissions, energy, and water use by around 9 percent.
When they compared the greenhouse gas emissions brought about by the production of these foods, they found lettuce to be overwhelmingly harmful.
More than that, if lettuce doesn’t require any additional preparation, bacon can not be eaten raw and to prepare it a lot of additional resources are being spent to finally reach 548 calories per 100 grams of baked bacon.
“Eating lettuce is over three times worse in greenhouse gas emissions than eating bacon”, said Paul Fischbeck, professor ofsocial and decisions sciences and engineering and public policy.
The controversial findings, presented in the journal Environment Systems and Decisions, resulted from a study conducted by experts at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh. And that’s why comparing the environmental impact of different foods based on their calorie content can be a little misleading – it’s not as if people cutting 400 calories worth of bacon out of their diet are going to supplement that with 400 calories worth of lettuce (or approximately four heads of Romaine). They concluded that for example, in the case of lettuce, each calorie “costs” in term of environmental damage more than each calorie of bacon.
Furthermore, according to him, it’s much more accurate to assess the benefits of a meal in terms of proteins instead of calories, as some foods can be highly nutritious, and yet have a low caloric content.
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In addition to methane, meat production produces nitrous oxide, which is 300 times as potent as CO2, and the resultant manure pollutes water and the air and nearly 20 percent of edible meats wind up in landfills. So if the total mass of lettuces isn’t 36 times heavier than the total mass of pork on this planet, it is wrong to say that lettuce poisons the environment more than pork. “What is good for us health-wise isn’t always what’s best for the environment”, said Tom, as reported by the Independent.
