Free Republic

A recent Washington Post essay faced backlash online after listing common Thanksgiving foods and their “climate impact” in order to inform readers which of the festivity’s staples can be consumed “with a clear conscience.” The Thursday article by food columnist Tamar Haspel, titled “The climate impact of the Thanksgiving meal might surprise you,” begins with the author admitting that “tallying the environmental impact of a holiday feast” does not seem to be in the holiday spirit. “I know, I know, nobody wants to put ‘climate’ and ‘Thanksgiving’ in the same sentence,” she continues.

As the world population grows, we have a pressing need to eat better and farm better, and those of us trying to figure out how to do those things have pointed at lots of different foods as problematic. Almonds, for their water use. Corn, for the monoculture. Beef, for its greenhouse gases. In each of those cases, there’s some truth in the finger-pointing, but none of them is a clear-cut villain. There’s one food, though, that has almost nothing going for it. It occupies precious crop acreage, requires fossil fuels to be shipped, refrigerated, around the world, and adds nothing...