Shock Statistic Regarding Christmas Dinner

First printed at least a year ago and now recycled by The Sunday Mirror yesterday and copied and pasted in the Times today is a report revealing some appalling facts about Christmas Dinner and how it’s destroying the planet. You can read it for yourself here. 

Amongst the worst things are that “Altogether the goodies on your plate could have flown nearly 85,000 miles – nearly FOUR TIMES round the world!”

and

“The meal flown 84,612 miles on a full plane would emit 31million kilograms of carbon dioxide….the equivalent of yearly emissions for 48,692 three-bedroom semi-detached houses.”

The first fact is extraordinary. Why the so-called airlines should deliberately fly my Christmas meal four times around the world before I get to eat it is beyond me. I want my food fresh and ready, not cold and jet-lagged. The second fact is the most damning. I conservatively estimate that this Christmas at least half of all the people in the country will eat a Christmas meal. This makes for around 30,000,000 meals which when multiplied by the number of houses (rounded up to 50,000) makes for 30,000,000 x 50,000 years of house carbon emissions which is 1,500,000,000,000 house years. Further more, the plane carrying all this food will have travelled 2,538,360,000,000 miles and emitted 930,000,000,000,000 kilograms of CO2. This is almost as heavy as the shite that’s printed in the British Press during an average week.

Below is a picture of a pre-packaged chipolata wrapped in bacon being loaded into a cargo plane, destined for a British plate this Christmas.