About gobble.earth

Why this exists

Food is a big part of the climate problem. Growing, processing and transporting what we eat accounts for roughly a quarter of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions: 26% of the global total, according to Our World in Data, which draws on Poore & Nemecek (2018).

A lot of advice focuses on buying local. The numbers suggest the type of food matters far more. Across the foods we track, beef from a beef herd sits at about 99 kg CO₂e per kg, while peas sit at about 1. We don't model how far food travels, so this is a claim about what's on the plate, not about food miles.

gobble.earth is here to make that visible, without guilt. You don't need to be perfect. Small swaps add up, and you decide what's realistic for you.

What the tool does

• Build a plate. Drag foods onto a plate, or tap + to add them. You'll see the total in kg CO₂e, a letter grade from A to E, and a fun comparison such as the driving equivalent. Save plates and compare them side by side.
• Plan my diet. Set a daily target, see where it sits against average diets and national figures, and build a typical day from your meals and snacks.

The planner has one idea worth knowing: progress over perfection. You say how often you'll stick to your plan, for example 80% of the time. For the rest, it assumes you eat an average diet you choose (vegan, vegetarian or meat-eating). You get a realistic yearly figure instead of an all-or-nothing one. Eating more lightly most of the time counts.

How the numbers work

• kg CO₂e (kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent) is one unit for all greenhouse gases, measured by their warming effect over 100 years.
• Per kg, as sold. Each food has one figure: kg CO₂e for 1 kg at retail weight. Dry foods such as rice, pasta and lentils are per dry kg.
• Farm to retail. Figures cover growing or rearing, processing, packaging, transport and retail. They don't include cooking, your fridge, or food you throw away.
• Global averages. Each figure is an average across many farms and producers, not one farm's number.
• Portions. Each food has a typical portion in grams. An item's impact is its grams ÷ 1,000 × its kg CO₂e per kg.
• Grades A–E. A is very low and E is very high. Single foods are graded per portion, plates per meal, and daily totals against the diet averages. The meal and day cut-offs are our judgement, anchored where possible to the diet averages.
• Dishes. Burgers, curries and similar dishes are built from typical ingredient weights. They're illustrative, not measured products.

Average diets

Diet averages come from Scarborough et al. (2023), who studied UK adults in the EPIC-Oxford cohort with diets standardised to 2,000 kcal a day. They're per person, per day:

For comparison: the global average is about 5.35 kg a day (our calculation from Our World in Data), and the US average about 4.7 (a different dataset). The EAT-Lancet planetary health diet is about 3.27, which is our own estimate. The UK average is a proxy, the medium-meat group, not an official figure.

Limits and honest caveats

Your plate and bigger change

Your plate is worth thinking about, but many food emissions are shaped by farming practice, policy, and what shops and restaurants offer. Your own choices help, and so can pushing for change beyond your own kitchen.

Privacy

• Your plates, plan and target are saved in your own browser's local storage. Nothing you enter is sent to us.
• No accounts, no sign-up, no ads and no analytics.
• Clearing your browser's site data deletes your saved work. To keep a copy, download your plan as a file.
• Fonts are hosted with the site rather than loaded from Google, and we don't add any third-party services.

Who it's for

Anyone curious about the carbon footprint of their food who wants concrete numbers rather than vague advice. You don't need any climate science, and you don't need to change everything at once.