Right. Cattle produces a lot more than just beef. Leather, horns, bones, and hooves are additional products that come from the cow. Then there's all the animal feed and plant fertilizer that come from the less desirable parts of the cow. I wonder what the carbon footprint is when the entirety of the cow is taken into account. No part of the animal is wasted during rendering.

Why is Kilograms of food product the one axis? shouldn't it be kcals or something?

Though this is a great chart, it isn't quite the whole picture either for climate impact. Almonds and almond milk get to be a lot worse alternative option if you consider the water consumption concerns where they are grown in California. They have many similar charts that attempt to quantify holistic carbon footprint.

Long story short, though not eating animal products is best for the environment, even just eating beef less often and not worrying about eggs and chickens can get you to over half the climate impact of full veganism and is a much easier transition for some.

Did I have some sort of a stroke or something? Am I hallucinating graphs that don't exist? Is OPs chart only showing tofu as an alternative and I just imagined the dozen or so other foods on the list that can be mixed and matched to build a nutritious meal with a significantly lower carbon footprint than beef?

Someone please send help, because all of these beef shills have me convinced that there are only two foods and we must all choose just one in the great food war

Fortunately, we have a series of tubes connecting every computer on the planet that can help answer questions like this!

Source

In short Aviation (1.9%) and Shipping (1.7%) are smaller than Livestock & Manure (5.8%) even before factoring in the secondary impacts that are largely driven by the livestock industry, like land use change, soil loss, and deforestation.

If you're specifically talking about transportation emissions for food, there's a graph for that as well!

Supply chain represents ~18% of the overall food footprint, smaller than livestock and land use changes.

Source

Talking meat specifically, the transportation emissions are a tiny piece of their overall footprint, as is shown in the OP.

Agriculture makes up a full quarter of our total emissions. Some of that is because of shipping it, of course, but there is absolutely no question whatsoever that agriculture is a huge contributing factor to climate change

Data about greenhouse emissions from transportation is talked about more frequently than any other source in my experience. I don't see the relevance to this data as beef and tofu can be produced locally or shipped overseas, so the emissions to produce the product would be a separate discussion versus emissions in transit.

I don’t see as much coverage on that issue.

No, there's plenty of coverage. If anything, there isn't enough coverage on animal agriculture because people can't fathom a world where they don't eat meat (or even just significantly reduce their consumption).

I always find the comparison between tofu and meat a bit unfair, as it wasn't invented for that purpose. In many asian cultures it is simply a thing in its own right, only we in the West have popularized it as a meat substitute and I don't think that does tofu justice.

other meat substitutes

Tofu is not a meat substitute. Tofu is just tofu, unless someone specifically picks it as a substitute for meat and sticks to it, in which case I guess it's their personal substitute for meat.

The website has a graph for that and for protein as well. It's pretty neat

The biggest difference here is not related to the animals themselves, but the scale.

Much of beef's emissions has to do with land use changes and diet which are both a necessary (but unfortunate) part of managing 1.5 billion cows to serve as a primary protein source for billions of people. In comparison, there's somewhere on the order of 30 million kangaroos on the planet (2% of the number of cows) and I'd wager the overwhelming majority of them are wild, not farmed for meat.

The difference in footprints here shows the differences in management practices and the downside of commercial ranching. If everyone on The planet switched their 0.5 servings of beef per day for 0.5 servings of kangaroos, nothing would be fundamentally different in the environmental outcomes. We'd still be clearing forests in the Amazon, just now it would be for kangaroos.

Sustainable meat consumption is only achieved through dramatic reductions in consumption. People don't have to quit meat, but it does have to become a thing reserved only for special occasions. Like it or not, the only path to sustainable food consumption requires everyone eating veggies (including the dreaded tofu) most of the time. Getting beef fed things like seaweed increases the portion of yearly meals that can include red meat sustainably, but does not somehow eliminate the fact that there majority of people's meals need to avoid red meat (sorry folks).

And it's cheaper. I remember in 90s Australia helped Russia not to starve by exporting kangaroo meaty

Someone shared below, but here you go: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-kcal-poore

It's amazing how much food you have to eat when you're a vegetarian. I went vegetarian for about a year. After my first month I felt like I was dying. Simple things like putting on my shoes left me exhausted. I finally started using a calorie calculator and discovered I was getting about a thousand less calories per day than I actually needed.

This is a lot to unpack, but I'll do my best in case it helps someone understand theses issues better:

My beef also isn't genetically modified to survive glyphosate, which gets absorbed by the soy that gets turned into your tofu

Glyphosate is bad, and should be banned. That said, beef is not somehow immune to glyphosate, as it is a contaminant in much of the food sources cattle eat, and the food for our food is not as strictly regulated as our food. Source Additionally:

• Much of the glyphosate found in food is found in grains, which are often served as accompaniment to a primary protein (e.g., meat or plant proteins). Swapping a beef burger for a veggie burger (or, your tofu straw man), likely does little to reduce overall glyphosate exposure, which would be coming from the bun. Using plant glyphosate levels as a negative for going vegan is deceptive at best.

• Glyphosate is not allowed in organic farming, so buying organic foods, including plant based protein alternatives, like organic tofu, dramatically reduces exposure to glyphosates. The system isn't perfect but has been shown to quickly and effectively reduce glyphosate levels. Source

• While "there is currently no consensus among the scientific community, and there is controversy over the safety of glyphosate and its health consequences" Source, there are studies showing correlation with negative health outcomes, so someone playing it safe may want to avoid these chemicals out of an abundance of caution. THAT SAID, there is a significant body of evidence that consuming red meat is linked to increase the risk of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and premature death. Source. Another Source. If you're avoiding "tofu" for your health, you're not doing yourself any favors.

If industrial farms would sell the manure and spread it on fields rather than blanket them with petrolchemicals (fertilizers) this entire argument would be completely moot.

No. Manure is only a small part of the issue. Much of the methane produced by cattle comes from digestion, not excrement. Additionally, much of the carbon footprint of cattle is a result of land use change, specifically deforestation and other land use change. None of this is solved by spreading shit around. (And its unclear from your comment but just in case it needs to be said, fertilizers and glyphosate are unrelated, but I think you know that, it was just unclear)

We need to return to traditional farming where the cattle can graze and naturally fertilize the land instead of being confined and mainly fed corn (which exacerbates the spread of ecoli).

The concept of regenerative farming is thrown around a lot as a justification for eating beef. First of all, its not happening, so stop using a pretend what if to justify bad behavior.

Secondly, a cow can graze the food it needs off of ~2 acres of (highly productive) land per head. Source.

To meet today's meat demand, there's ~1.5 billion cows on the planet. If you were to give each cow 2 acres, that would take 3 billion acres of land, or 1.5x the land area of the continental US. This would be a logistical nightmare in addition to all of the other challenges that come with this land grab. There's no scenario where we maintain current meat consumption levels sustainably.

At some point people are going to have to put down the steak and gasp eat some tofu.

Traditional farming can also reverse desertification of land therefore can reduce the CO2 footprint of this industry.

No beef required for this one. Though it is worth noting much of the desertification is directly a result of clearing land for cattle and their feed.

Also get mad at the military and they are the top contributors of CO2 emissions and they have 0 restrictions and are omitted from every study.

Agreed!

Can you expand on that or at least link me to the people smarter than me?

I think just because dairy cows live longer. Beef cows are killed younger, you don't need to wait until their milk production dwindles. It's not clear if accounting for the milk carbon footprint was taken into account or not.

Tofu is really easy to prepare poorly, it's important to season it heavily as bland tofu doesn't really taste like anything. But this makes tofu extremely versatile, it can even be used in smoothies.

The other comments are right, but if you don't like tofu there are absolutely other options. Legumes in particular are really good for the same kind of role in many dishes, and in my opinion are generally far more enjoyable. Get some mushroom and/or seaweed flavours in there for the umami and butter beans for the texture and all the nutritional goodness and I'm a happy man