How Reducing Meat Consumption Could end World Hunger

          While in recent years the general population has become more familiar with the way in which the factory farming industry and food system built around it is one of the largest environmental disruptions, due in part to its extreme resource consumption, it’s less discussed the way it's inefficient resource use is affecting the well being of humanity. More specifically, the way in which these resources are effectively being wasted.   

           The way the world’s current food system is set up, less than half of the crops we grow are consumed by humans. The massive amounts of water, land, and labor expended for crop creation, are about 1/2 the time gobbled up by a cow, that will eventually be eaten by humans, who will gain a mere fraction of the crop's original caloric value. In Jonathan Foley's “A Five-Step Plan to Feed the World” he put the frustrating inefficiency of this system into perspective by breaking down the caloric information of popular animal products. He says that every 100 calories of grain we feed animals, translates to about 40 calories of milk, 22 calories of eggs, 12 of chicken, 10 of pork, or 3 of beef. 

           Now it doesn’t take a genius to look at those numbers, and the number of people going hungry worldwide, which is nearly 1 billion, to realize that a food system centered around meat production is just about the least efficient one possible. Making the choice to eat something that is part of the primary process, rather than eating a crop’s second-hand calories through meat, seems like almost too simple of a solution. These choices start in the grocery store, and are truly the first step in restructuring the current food system. 

*See more on CAFO resource use in post: How Factory Farming is Destroying the Planet