What if everyone ate a bit less meat?
Skipping one typical meat meal avoids roughly 2.8 kg of CO₂e and about 1,060 litres of freshwater — modest alone, but it multiplies. A family, a classroom, or an office each skipping a few meat meals a week adds up fast. Slide the numbers and see.
In one year, that group would avoid roughly:
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of CO₂e — —
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of freshwater — —
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meat portions left off plates
How it's calculated
Each skipped meal is a 150 g meat portion. Per-kilogram footprints are the ones my No Meat Today app uses — beef ≈ 60 kg CO₂e/kg, chicken ≈ 6, matching Poore & Nemecek (2018, Science) — with farm-to-plate freshwater estimates (beef ≈ 15,400 L/kg). The "typical mix" option blends chicken, pork, beef and fish by weight (35/35/20/10) into ≈ 2.8 kg CO₂e and ≈ 1,060 L per meal. The totals are what the meat would have cost, not net of the plant meal that replaces it — that meal has a footprint too, roughly a tenth as large. Comparisons: one Paris–New York round-trip flight ≈ 1 t CO₂e per passenger, one Olympic pool ≈ 2.5 million litres. All figures are global averages — honest orders of magnitude, not carbon accounting.
Keep reading
- Eat Less Meat, Cut Your Carbon Footprint: What Works
How much carbon eating less meat actually saves, why beef dominates the math, and which swaps cut your food footprint the most.
- How Much Meat Is Too Much Per Week? The Numbers
Health bodies suggest under 350–500 g of cooked red meat per week and minimal processed meat. What that looks like in real meals, and how to count it.
- Becoming Vegetarian Gradually: A Step-by-Step Path
How to become vegetarian gradually: a staged path from one meat-free day to a full vegetarian diet, with the nutrition basics covered.