What's the carbon footprint of a meal?
A kilogram of CO₂e is hard to picture, so this page counts in clouds instead: one cloud is a quarter kilo, and six of them are a day's worth of food if the rest of a life is to fit a livable climate budget. Add what is on your plate and watch the clouds gather. A steak and chips is not the same sky as a lentil curry.
An empty plate. Add what you ate, or what you are about to.
The jar holds 6 clouds a day. Past that, the app turns the day red.
How it's calculated
Each food is multiplied by its weight and by a per-kilogram emission factor — the same ones my No Meat Today app uses when it prices a photographed plate. Animal foods come from the largest food-production meta-analysis to date, Poore & Nemecek (2018, Science), as charted by Our World in Data: roughly 60 kg of CO₂e per kg of beef, 6 for chicken, 5 for fish, 4.5 for eggs, 3 for milk. Lamb (39) and pork (12) follow the EWG Meat Eater's Guide, which counts the meat you actually eat rather than carcass weight. Shrimp (15) and molluscs (2) are my own estimates, with no single study behind them. Plant foods use Our World in Data's category means: most vegetables and fruit sit between 0.4 and 0.7; rice (4), tomatoes grown under glass (2.1), tofu (3.2) and mushrooms (3) carry their own figure.
A cloud is 250 g of CO₂e. Six clouds — 1.5 kg — is the app's own target for a day's food: a two-tonne year, which is roughly what a livable climate allows each person, divided into 365 days and shared out, gives food about 22 clouds a day; the jar keeps the part that comes from the plate itself. Below half a cloud the calculator shows nothing, above it at least one, exactly like the app. Every figure, and the arithmetic in between, is on the Sources page. These are global averages: your local numbers will differ, but the ranking and the orders of magnitude hold.
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.
- How to Eat Less Meat: A Realistic Plan That Sticks
A practical, guilt-free plan to eat less meat: track first, swap easy meals, keep favorites, and build a habit that lasts.