Almost 20 years ago, after a harrowing experience watching “Food, Inc.,” I decided to become vegetarian. I told my parents my choice was motivated in equal parts by wanting to do what’s right for animals and for the environment. They rolled their eyes.
It was an admittedly dramatic stand. But what none of us realized was that the impact of my decision would matter differently depending on where I lived.
In my hometown of Phoenix, skipping meat spared 1,092 kilograms of carbon dioxide per year—150 more than it would years later when I moved to New York City, according to a new study published in Nature Climate Change.
Researchers mapped the carbon “hoofprint” of meat consumption—the emissions tied to the beef, pork, and chicken eaten in more than 3,500 U.S. cities—and found that geography and the supply chains of a city shape the carbon emissions tied to meat consumption.
That means big differences in the emissions of eating a coney dog in Detroit and a Cuban sandwich in Key West, FL.
It’s also a significant finding for homeowners concerned about the carbon emissions of their home. You can outfit your home with solar panels, switch to LED bulbs, and drive an EV, but your city’s meat supply chain may still keep your household carbon score stubbornly high.
In fact, the study found that dietary emissions in some metro areas rival the carbon output of at-home fossil fuel use—an overlooked factor that could eventually influence how sustainable a city, even a home, is judged to be.
‘Carbon hoofprint’ mapped
So, how does your city pan out?
At first glance, the study’s findings seem intuitive: Places with more people generate higher total emissions from meat consumption—more mouths mean more greenhouse gases.
But when adjusted for population, the same grocery list can carry vastly different climate costs depending on where the meat is eaten.
Per-capita “hoofprint,” or the emissions linked to a city’s meat consumption, range from roughly 500 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent in parts of the Upper Midwest to more than 1,700 kilograms in sections of the South and Great Plains.
That’s because emissions from meat consumption don’t just reflect how much a city eats, but also where the meat comes from and how it’s produced.
Beef was the biggest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions when compared with pork and poultry, accounting for about 73% of a city’s hoofprint, the study found. High-hoofprint metros cluster in Texas, Oklahoma, and Missouri, where feedlots, open manure lagoons, and long-distance feed imports make meat production especially carbon-intensive.
By contrast, cities in Michigan and Wisconsin have some of the lowest hoofprints because their beef supply comes largely from culled dairy cattle and shorter, more efficient supply chains.
Despite similar per-capita meat consumption nationwide—around 79 kilograms per person each year—the resulting emissions vary nearly threefold because of these regional differences in production practices.
The household connection: How lifestyle meets location
For the eco-minded homeowner, these findings may change how they measure the sustainability of their home, or even where they choose to live.
At the household level, diet-related emissions account for about 43% of the greenhouse gases produced by home energy use, and in high-hoofprint cities—home to roughly 60 million Americans—that share exceeds 50%.
Put another way, a city’s “meatshed”—the network of farms, feed producers, and processors that supply its meat—determines how climate-friendly its dinner plates really are, much in the same way that a city’s power grid determines how green a home’s electricity is.
That means that households with identical energy efficiency can still have vastly different carbon profiles based on where they fall in a meatshed, making the decision to forgo meat more, or less, impactful.
Part of it comes back to how much power a home uses, which is most directly related to how much energy it needs to keep a comfortable temperature: Heating and air conditioning account for more than half of U.S. residential energy use (52%), according to the Energy Information Administration.
So in San Diego, where mild temperatures keep heating demand low and the grid is relatively clean, diet-related emissions make up a much larger share of total household emissions—a staggering 77%, the study found.
Meanwhile, in Boston, where cold winters and swampy summers drive up energy demand and regional meat production is less carbon-intensive, housing infrastructure remains the dominant source of emissions, with meat emissions accounting for only 24% of household emissions.
The finding suggests a new way to define a “sustainable home” as one that not only uses less energy, but also is connected to lower-emission supply chains. Yet most sustainability indices don’t account for diet-linked emissions.
That omission may not last. Cities such as New York have begun integrating food systems into their municipal climate plans, in a shift that could eventually influence residential benchmarks and climate-risk disclosures.
For developers and urban planners, the study’s city-level hoofprint maps open a new dimension of climate strategy—even marketing. By pinpointing where food-related emissions are highest, local governments can better direct investments—into community composting, plant-based procurement, or urban agriculture—to achieve the greatest emissions reductions per household.
That can then be sold to eco-minded house hunters and renters like myself who long for a carbon-guilt-free cheeseburger.
Reducing the hoofprint: What cities and homeowners can do
The study’s authors stress that shrinking the nation’s carbon hoofprint will require policy-level change as much as personal choice—something my parents, ever skeptical of my idealism, tried to tell me years ago.
While individual habits matter, the emissions tied to meat are ultimately shaped by systems: how cities manage food waste, what kinds of meat their supply chains favor, and how production practices are regulated.
Researchers modeled several strategies that could sharply curb emissions without eliminating meat entirely. Halving retail and household food waste would reduce the hoofprint by about 16%. Replacing half of all beef consumption with pork or poultry cuts an additional 30%. Adding a weekly “meatless Monday” and combined reductions reach as much as 51%.
At the household level, individuals can reinforce these shifts by buying from local meat producers that use efficient feed systems and better manure management, or by adopting plant-forward diets, especially in high-hoofprint regions.
But the most radical idea that the study offers is thinking of dietary habits as part of a home’s carbon budget—alongside heating, cooling, and transportation—extending sustainability beyond the walls of the house to the dinner table itself.
