Had a cheeseburger lately?
Maybe you had a celebratory cookout on Monday in the shadow of the eclipse? Or maybe you took the night off from cooking and went out to a favorite restaurant and ordered a big juicy cheeseburger with lettuce, tomato, and pickles. Yum.
Shift gears with me here, literally. There are about 270 million private vehicles on the road in the USA and over the past several years, SUVs have accounted for about 53% of new car sales. That’s a lot of SUVs. Reportedly that is because people feel safer in SUVs than sedans and pickups. Perhaps you didn’t realize it — and it would be strange if you did — but there is a relationship between an SUV and that cheeseburger you ate. Can you guess what it is?
A single cheeseburger has a carbon footprint of eight pounds of carbon dioxide. What that means, according to The Center for Sustainable Systems website, is that a “carbon footprint is the total greenhouse gas emissions caused directly and indirectly by an individual, organization, event, or product.” They calculate the weight of a carbon footprint by adding the greenhouse gas emissions resulting from every stage of a something’s production, manufacturing, use, and end-of-life (it’s decomposition or incineration). It turns out that a single cheeseburger has a hefty weight when it comes to carbon.
Swedish researchers have been calculating the carbon footprint of just about anything and everything you can buy, eat, or use. Not because they are Obsessive-Compulsive but for a purpose. When Swedes go to the store and reach for diapers or a pound of ground beef, it says what it’s carbon footprint is right on the package. If they go to a Swedish MacDonald’s Drive-thru and order that Big Mac, it will say it’s creation-consumption-and-disposal produced eight pounds of carbon dioxide.
To break it down, because I find this fascinating as well as disconcerting, those clever Swedes figured out the energy demands and consumption required to grow the tomatoes, lettuce, and cucumbers (for pickles); for feeding the dairy cows that provided the milk for the cheese; growing and milling the wheat for the bun; pickling the cucumbers for those yummy pickles; growing the feed for the cattle; preparing and freezing the meat; running the restaurant that sells you the cheeseburger; storing and transporting all the ingredients; and finally, cooking that burger — cheese or no cheese.
The average American eats 150 cheeseburgers a year. All the cheeseburgers consumed in the USA in one year — wait for it — leave the same carbon footprint as all the SUVs driven in one year. After that equivalency blows your mind, I hope it will also create a queasy stomach. Even after all those factories, and all that fracking, and the preponderance of fossil fuels are managed better, the carbon footprint of our eating habits will be blowing a whole in the ozone and raising the thermostat of the atmosphere. But there are things we can do to change it.
According to those same Sustainable Systems folks, eating one vegetarian meal one day a week is as if you drove 1,160 fewer miles a year. It is simple: use locally sourced food to save on the transportation footprint; eat a lot more chicken than beef because beef’s carbon footprint is 7.2 times higher; and just eat fewer cheeseburgers.
Cameron Miller of Geneva is an author and minister. His fiction and poetry are available through Amazon. Contact him through his website at subversivepreacher.org.
DENIM SPIRIT: Cheeseburger, cheeseburger!
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11.04.2024
Had a cheeseburger lately?
Maybe you had a celebratory cookout on Monday in the shadow of the eclipse? Or maybe you took the night off from cooking and went out to a favorite restaurant and ordered a big juicy cheeseburger with lettuce, tomato, and pickles. Yum.
Shift gears with me here, literally. There are about 270 million private vehicles on the road in the USA and over the past several years, SUVs have accounted for about 53% of new car sales. That’s a lot of SUVs. Reportedly that is because people feel safer in SUVs than sedans and pickups. Perhaps you didn’t realize it — and it would be strange if you did — but there is a relationship between an SUV and that cheeseburger you ate. Can you guess what it is?
A single cheeseburger has a carbon footprint of eight pounds of carbon dioxide. What that means, according to The Center for Sustainable........
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