If the primary overarching goal of TamaTama is to make great tasting low carbon food, the first step is to know what the carbon footprint of a tamale is. Then we incrementally adjust our food sources, ingredients, cooking methods, etc. to minimize the climate impact. This is not as straightforward as it may first appear. There is no 'standard' tamale carbon footprint data available anywhere, at least to our knowledge. Even if there was, this would help us, since we want to be able to adjust our ingredients, etc. and estimate their carbon footprint. So, here we lay out our basic method and our data gathered from across the web. Feel free to send us a comment if you think something is not correct, or we're missing something.

We find that our tamales produce about 1.51 kg of CO2 for a serving of three tamales. For comparative purposes a burger made from beef is estimated to be about 9.95 kg per serving ([1]). These numbers will likely change as we find more precise data and update our models.

Here's some of the data we gathered and used in in this basic analysis: 

First tamale carbon footprint

Our impact