How can we get the biggest food bang per acre? The question becomes increasingly important because the number of humans is increasing and the amount of arable land isn’t. Moreover, as on-going food inflation indicates, the kinds of foods people eat impact global food prices. People in China and other developing countries have been adopting a more “westernized” diet, thus driving up demand for more agriculturally-intensive products.
Researchers at Cornell compared 42 diets with varied meat composition in terms of how much land it took to produce the food. Unsurprisingly, it takes a lot less land to grow the food feed a vegetarian than to feed a heavy meat eater:
“A person following a low-fat vegetarian diet, for example, will need less than half (0.44) an acre per person per year to produce their food,” said Christian Peters, M.S. ’02, Ph.D. ’07, a Cornell postdoctoral associate in crop and soil sciences and lead author of the research. “A high-fat diet with a lot of meat, on the other hand, needs 2.11 acres.”
However, a strict vegetarian diet is not necessarily the most efficient in terms of land use because it takes higher-quality farmland to raise crops than it does to raise animals:
Thus, although vegetarian diets in New York state may require less land per person, they use more high-valued land. “It appears that while meat increases land-use requirements, diets including modest amounts of meat can feed more people than some higher fat vegetarian diets,” said Peters.
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According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the average American ate approximately 5.8 ounces of meat and eggs a day in 2005.
“In order to reach the efficiency in land use of moderate-fat, vegetarian diets, our study suggests that New Yorkers would need to limit their annual meat and egg intake to about 2 cooked ounces a day,” Peters said.
Not only is such a diet more economical, but it’s healthier, too.