‘Surf and turf’ can have carbon footprint of cross-country road trip: study

Dining out? You may want to think twice before ordering the “surf and turf special.”

The carbon footprint of a steak and shrimp dinner — were it to come from shrimp farms and pasture formerly occupied by mangroves — is the same as driving a small car across the continental United States, according to a new study.

The research, published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, quantifies the full impacts
of mangrove deforestation and puts it in terms of the consumer end product.

Mangrove forests have major implications for global climate. On average, they can store even more carbon than a similarly sized area of rainforest. When those systems are degraded or destroyed for other uses, that carbon is slowly released
back into the atmosphere. What was not fully understood — until this study — was the full carbon footprint of food production in mangrove areas; other studies did not include the full effects of deforestation into their analyses.

“What we know about carbon footprints for many types of food products [grown in former mangrove areas] has…