Nothing you eat, or anyone or everyone eats has any impact on “the planet.”
Climate hoaxers cannot demonstrate that either emissions from coal plants or cheeseburgers or anything else has warmed or changed anything, anywhere.https://t.co/JOyI4vHCT3 pic.twitter.com/PiJdbLQYR2
— Steve Milloy (@JunkScience) October 21, 2025
by Daniel Wolfe and Naema Ahmed
Researchers have documented for years that eating beef, pork and chicken has a significant environmental impact, especially when it comes to heating the planet.
But it’s far from a uniform impact. What you eat, and where you eat it, can have a big effect on how much you’re contributing to climate change, according to a study published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change.
For the first time, researchers calculated the planet-warming pollution emitted from raising the beef, pork and chicken Americans eat — their carbon “hoofprint” — for every town and city in the country.
Across the country, eating beef is the bigger contributor to harmful pollutants. But it’s not as simple as that. Its origins matter. Eating a steak or a burger in Milwaukee, where the meat comes from nearby dairy cows, generates fewer emissions than in Oklahoma City, where beef tends to come from feedlots.
Some cattle operators near McAllen, Texas, store cow manure in open lagoons that release methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere. And grazing cattle in Kansas and Nebraska generate more emissions than other livestock, since it takes them longer to gain weight compared with those raised in feedlots.
Map and key for U.S. map
Joshua Newell, one of the paper’s co-authors and a professor of environment and sustainability at the University of Michigan, helped coin the term “hoofprint” more than 15 years ago when he was a postdoctoral student at University of Southern California. The goal, he said, was “bringing food into the discussion about what makes a city sustainable,” to expand the conversation on reducing carbon emissions.
Many Americans are likely to keep eating meat, even though beef has become more expensive in recent months. Still, the new study offers a road map to determining your diet’s climate impact, including what you can do if you live in a place where it has a greater environmental toll.
Where are hoofprints the largest?
Can you guess the top three emitting cities in this analysis? Hint: They’re where the most mouths to feed are: New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. When adjusted for emissions per capita, though, researchers found little connection between how much a town eats and its climate impact.
The new analysis by scientists from the University of Michigan and the University of Minnesota shows that these emissions vary depending on where cities get their meat. Researchers modeled pollutants released at every step of the supply chain, from what it takes to get feed for the animals to the climate impact of raising and butchering them. This allowed them to estimate the hoofprints of more than 3,000 towns and cities.
What is my city’s carbon hoofprint?
People in Washington, D.C. emit 931 kgCO₂ equivalent per year, on average, when eating 176 pounds of meat (80 kg) per capita. Meat consumption is above the national average, while emissions per capita is below the national average.
What raises the hoofprint?
On average, 73 percent of every city’s hoofprint comes down to beef. Not only is it more popular, producing beef generates far more planet-warming pollution compared with raising hogs and chickens. However, raising cattle in feed lots can be more energy efficient, despite its other environmental and ethical costs. And the type of feed a farm uses and how it manages waste can tip these cows’ emissions the other way.
The distance that cattle feed is transported, as well as how far cows travel to be slaughtered, also matters, since this can span thousands of miles.
Newell, however, said transportation is “a small portion of the hoofprint.”
Mario Herrero, who directs Food Systems and Global Change at Cornell University — a interdisciplinary group of academics and entrepreneurs working on sustainable food systems — and who was not involved in the study, said it was significant that it found some cities’ meat consumption was three times as high as others’.
Ben Goldstein, one of the study’s authors and an assistant professor of environment and sustainability at the University of Michigan, said in an interview that when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions, “beef is still the main culprit” regardless of how it’s produced.
Mary-Thomas Hart, chief counsel at the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, said the findings on emissions differences along the beef supply chain were not surprising. Hart stressed that compared with other countries, the “United States has the lowest emissions intensity per pound of beef,” citing efforts to lower greenhouse gases through improved grazing and feed management.
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