Animal agriculture generates an ungodly amount of animal suffering and greenhouse gas emissions. Ideally, everyone would adopt a vegan diet^[1], but since this appears to be too much to ask for most people, the next question becomes: which food is the least bad?

Here we run into an uncomfortable observation. Meat from larger animals tends to produce more CO₂, while meat from smaller animals tends to cause more animal suffering.
This makes intuitive sense: when converting animals into a set mass of meat, more individual animals must suffer if they are smaller. We can see this in the data, e.g., we slaughter 309 million cows per year, while the number of chickens slaughtered exceeds 75 Billion per year.

Let’s start ranking

Let's start by comparing greenhouse gas emissions. Which foods have the lowest CO₂ impact?
Here’s how many kilograms of CO₂-equivalized emissions are produced per kilogram of food (some create methane etc, but that’s accounted for by converting it into the same unit), ranked from worst to best:

Beef (beef herd)     99.48 kg
Lamb & Mutton    39.72 kg
Beef (dairy herd)   33.3 kg
Prawns (farmed)   26.87 kg
Cheese                       23.88 kg
Fish (farmed)          13.63 kg
Pig Meat                   12.31 kg
Poultry Meat           9.87 kg
Eggs                             4.67 kg
Rice                              4.45 kg
Tofu                             3.16 kg
Milk                             3.15 kg
Soy milk                     0.98 kg

As we can see, larger animals tend to create more CO₂.

Can we create a similar ranking for animal suffering? Yes we can, if we take the sentience figures from this report and apply it to the production process used to create the meat. Here’s the equivalized days of suffering per kg of food (some have bigger brains etc, but that’s accounted for by converting it into the same unit), ranked from worst to best:

Farmed catfish        290 d
Battery cage eggs   42 d
Farmed salmon       27 d
Chicken                      27 d
Turkey                         15 d
Pork                              3.9 d
Beef                              0.8 d
Milk                              0.049 d
Tofu                              0 d
Soy milk                      0 d

As we can see, the smaller animals tend to produce more suffering. The best products on these lists, both in terms of animal suffering and CO₂, are tofu and soy milk.
For those who don't want to go v...

Kashvi Mulchandani

Kashvi Mulchandani