{"id":2230,"date":"2007-10-09T21:42:09","date_gmt":"2007-10-10T01:42:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wordpress\/2007\/10\/diet_and_effici\/"},"modified":"2007-10-09T21:42:09","modified_gmt":"2007-10-10T01:42:09","slug":"diet_and_effici","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/2007\/10\/diet_and_effici\/","title":{"rendered":"Diet And Efficient Agriculutral Land Use"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;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 &#8220;westernized&#8221; diet, thus driving up demand for more agriculturally-intensive products.<br \/>\nResearchers at Cornell <a href=\"http:\/\/www.news.cornell.edu\/stories\/Oct07\/diets.ag.footprint.sl.html\">compared 42 diets<\/a> 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:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;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,&#8221; said Christian Peters, M.S. &#8217;02, Ph.D. &#8217;07, a Cornell postdoctoral associate in crop and soil sciences and lead author of the research. &#8220;A high-fat diet with a lot of meat, on the other hand, needs 2.11 acres.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>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:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Thus, although vegetarian diets in New York state may require less land per person, they use more high-valued land. &#8220;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,&#8221; said Peters.<br \/>\n. . .<br \/>\nAccording to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the average American ate approximately 5.8 ounces of meat and eggs a day in 2005.<br \/>\n&#8220;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,&#8221; Peters said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Not only is such a diet more economical, but it&#8217;s healthier, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<a href=\"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/2007\/10\/diet_and_effici\/\" rel=\"bookmark\" title=\"Permalink to Diet And Efficient Agriculutral Land Use\"><p>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&#8217;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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2230","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"h-entry","8":"hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2230"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2230\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}