Christmas Dinner is, for many of us, one of the highlights of the season.
Gathering the family around the dinner table for a centerpiece meal, the leftovers from which will likely be seen lagging around the fridge until New Year’s. It’s a joyful occasion, one of the expressions of togetherness that we desperately need at the cold, harsh edge of the year, especially in times like these.
But the celebration is not without its cost. Often meat-heavy, as an outgrowth of the traditional Sunday dinner, the carbon footprint of the Christmas dinner can be substantial. Meats, and animal products in general, tend to skew higher-carbon due to the high land requirements and cost of feeding animals.
For the environmentally-minded, Christmas dinner can be a nightmare.
A Christmas Carbon Breakdown
Here at Sustainable Business Magazine, we like to keep an eye on our greenhouse gases, and as one of our readers you probably do too. With that in mind, here’s our Christmas dinner carbon breakdown:
Topping the chart, lamb and beef are the biggest offenders as carbon footprint goes, with lamb clocking in an eye-watering 39.2 kilos of CO2 per kilo of meat (the equivalent of driving around 91 miles) according to Greeneatz. Beef is a little over ten kilos of CO2 per kilo better, with each kilo being equal to about 63 miles in a car or 27 kilos of CO2.
This is before you factor in the fuel spent to transport the meat from the farm to you, which can vary depending on the area you live in.
Divided between a family of four (accounting for leftovers), that kilo of beef amounts to nearly seven kilos of carbon per person all by itself.
That said, the carbon footprint of the traditional Christmas turkey is less than half that of an equivalent amount of beef – only 10.9 kg of CO2 per kilo. But with around 2 million turkeys estimated to be consumed at Christmas dinner in the UK alone, those emissions add up.
2.73 kg of CO2 per person doesn’t sound like a lot, relatively speaking, but put those numbers into a calculator and you’ll find around 65 million kg of CO2 a year from turkey alone!
The Power of Plants
It’s not a hopeless situation, though – while meat products typically set the carbon emissions of your dinner high from the start, produce is comparatively extremely light on the environment.
Potatoes are among the highest-CO2 vegetables rated by Greeneatz, and even they have a carbon cost less than a third that of turkey, or almost a tenth that of beef. A solution to the meat problem then presents itself – replace meat products from your Christmas dinner with plant-based alternatives.
Cutting meat out of your Christmas dinner might seem like sacrilege, but it might just help save the planet.
Non-animal-based alternatives to meat such as tofu, Quorn and Beyond are becoming more widely available and accepted even among non-vegetarians all the time. Quorn’s myco-protein-based meat alternatives for example claims to boast CO2 emissions of just 0.7kg per kilo.
That’s to be taken with a grain of salt, since research into environmental impacts of most meat alternatives is not yet comprehensive enough or independent enough to form a full picture. However, the environmental good of reducing meat consumption is proven.
Nut Roast, Anyone?
If you really find you can’t stomach switching your turkey for Quorn, there is another classic option available to cut the meat out of your Christmas dinner: the humble nut roast.
Rather than the attempt to replicate the experience of meat that alternatives often struggle with, why not just try something different? A nut roast isn’t a meat substitute, nor is it trying to be. It has its own texture, its own flavour, its own place at the dinner table.
Properly prepared and seasoned, the nut roast can easily take pride of place in your Christmas dinner.
Other sustainable moves to make in your Christmas dinner include switching out your gravy and stuffing for a vegetable-based alternatives, as well as trying to keep food miles down by buying local whereever possible.
We hope this article has given you some food (!) for thought, and wish you a merry sustainable Christmas from all of us here at the magazine!
