Welcome to the cheese paradise! No doubt, this magic topping makes every dish just better. Literally, I challenge you to name a dish that it can't improve. 

Global production of cheese is skyrocketing, but dairy products and cheese especially can have similar impacts on the environment as meat. In some scenarios they're even more harmful to the planet. To make cheese you need milk and to make milk you need animals that emit loads of greenhouse gas emissions and uses lots and lots of water. 

I mean I really love cheese, but we need to talk about it. Milk that is used is actually extremely important because depending on which study you are looking at between 80% to 95% of chesse's greenhouse gas emissions come from the milk. More than half of those emissions come from the farming process. Because cows and other milk producing animals fart and breath out methane, a gas that is 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide at heating the planet.

The processing of cheese accounts for between 2% to 18% of cheese's final carbon dioxide emissions. More emmisions than meat? That is absolutely insane! 

But there are other players on the market that can further reduce your carbon footprint : that is vegan cheeses. But they might not be as environmentally friendly as you think, just like you would when making cheese from animal milk. Here we use cashew but that's not the only alternative. There are all sorts of ingredients for cheese alternatives : cashews, almonds, soy and even olive oil.

Because of all these different ingredients, and an abundance of different recipes, it's quite hard to calculate greenhouse gas emissions. Vegan cheese are fairly new so so there are not a lot of studies on their environmental impact yet. But it's sure that the greenhouse gas emissions of alternative cheeses are way lower than animal milk cheese. 

Alright, alright, alright! That was pretty good even for a cheese lover but real cheese is just a little bit better in taste, but looking at the environment, bottom-line is that the alternatives are always better. You have to look a little bit at what exactly is in them and how much of it. If you want to go full out on saving the planet, go for oat-based options 

Real cheese will always be my number one, but I'll try to switch it up with some tasty alternatives.