Eating less meat is a route to reducing your carbon footprint. Cutting it out altogether can reduce your carbon footprint by 1 ton a year. But there is an exception is this argument. A vegetarian meal is not automatically better for the environment if it contains lots of cheese. Cheese contains cow’s milk. Dairy cows which are specifically reared to produce milk, and cows need a lot of land to be reared and fed which leads to deforestation. Despite efforts to grow more trees, the number of trees in the world is still shrinking as we cut down more trees to clear land for cows, palm oil and paper products. Deforestation contributes 12-20% to global warming each year as carbon is released into the atmosphere when trees are clears and burnt. This is why cheese with cow’s milk creates more emissions than chicken, pork and farmed fish.

Cheesy vegetarian meals to avoid

Meals such as macaroni cheese, four cheese pizza, a cheese sandwich or a jacket potato or sandwich with lots of cheese can be just as bad a meal with meat.

Chicken sandwich      509g CO₂e

Ham sandwich             678g CO₂e

Cheese sandwich        938g CO₂e

Margherita pizza          1.4kg CO₂e

Four cheeses pizza     2.2kg CO₂e

Pepperoni pizza            2.2kg CO₂e

So, what can you do instead? Treating cheese like a meat means eat it in small quantities. You can have it on a pizza, jacket potato or a sandwich but just don’t put huge amounts of it on. There are numerous vegan cheeses, and they are getting better in taste all the time. So, they are worth experimenting with. If you are a cheese lover and really want to have it, choose soft cheese over hard cheese. Hard cheeses are usually cooked and aged for longer requiring more energy and have a higher content of milk compared to soft cheese.

Source: ‘Food and climate change without the hot air’ by SL Bridle

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