What's worse for the environment having a chicken breast or a can of tuna?

Question

Just wondering.

Answer 1

I'd say that a chicken breast would be worse, but only by a bit.

Chickens are DRIVEN to the slaughterhouse. Emissions from the trucks are terrible for the environment. Also, more than half the water in the U.S. is used to raise animals for meat.

Tuna is captured by people on a boat that can put contaminants in the water.

Chicken is packaged in things that are not biodegradable so the packaging has to go in the trash.

Tuna is generally in cans that can be recycled.

Answer 2

Assuming both are commercially produced, I'd say the chicken is worse overall.

Take water, for example. You need a lot more water. You need water to give the bird directly, of course. But you also need water to grow the grain that will feed the bird. Since we don't have rivers flowing over every inch of the country, this means that we need to irrigate. This takes energy and makes a larger carbon footprint.

Now, there's the grain. Most chicken growers don't have their own farm, so the feed must be transported from the grain farm to the chicken farm. This is usually done by train or truck. In either case, you're increasing the carbon footprint further.

But the transportation doesn't end there. Then, the birds need to go to a slaughterhouse. (More gas, greater carbon footprint.) Slaughterhouses also increase the carbon footprint, since for the most part they aren't 100% human-powered.

Then, the birds need to be made usable (that is, plucked, cut up into usable parts, heads removed, etc). Then they need to be taken to stores. Then to your home. Then you cook them. All in all, huge amounts of energy.

This doesn't even take into account the amount of p**p they make (which is obviously not something you really want in your groundwater and rivers). In short, chicken is highly inefficient when you look at everything that goes into it.

Answer 3

reuse, reduce, recycle.  look for products with less packaging & try to find other uses for it after you're done.

Answer 4

It depends.  If I go to my friend's house where they raise their own chickens on organic feed and their kitchen table scraps and I take one of them and kill it, pluck it, cook it and eat it, then there is very little impact on the environment.

But if I buy chicken from a store and that chicken was factory farmed, then I'm supporting an industry that pollutes the environment with millions of pounds of chicken f***s, dead, diseased chicken carcasses, etc.

Ditto for the fish.  So, since it's probably easier to find local, healthy chickens, I'd say the former.  But few people get their chicken that way.

Answer 5

Can of tuna. Not only does it NOT disintegrate ( sorry I don't know how to spell this word), tuna fishers ' nets also once in a while catch and kill dolphins by accident.

Answer 6

breast is best

Answer 7

Canned tuna. The process of obtaining a single chicken breast from a single chicken is less devastating (not from the chicken's perspective of course)  than what is involved in producing a single can of tuna

Answer 8

can of tuna