,




Have you ever wondered what it really takes to make a delicious burger? I mean yeah'; the beef comes from a cow but that needs space to graze and the bun is made of wheat which grows in wide-open fields and the salad has grown in a dedicated farm. Before they all come together and meet their destiny' my mouth, all that food-growing space adds up.

So, it begs the question. How much space does each of us need to feed ourselves for a whole year? What's the food footprint of the average person?

Hold on to you're hats because it is about to get messy in here. On average, each human on the planet eats nearly 2 kilograms of food every day. Now of course this varies across the world, with the Japanese eating just over 1.6 kilograms and people from the US polishing off nearly 3 kilograms. But I'm going to have to deal with a lot of averages in this article, and the average overall daily food consumption is around 2 kilos.

Now that 2 kilos are made up of all the basic food groups: grains, meat, veggies, and dairy as well as our daily indulgences of sugar and alcohol.

Over a whole year, we can get through an astounding amount of stuff. We'll drink around 90 liters of milk consumed nearly 64 kilos of potatoes and those occasional sweet treats. They add up to 29 kilos of sugar a year. That is roughly the weight of a nine-year-old.

All the food that goes down our collective hatches has to be grown or raised on the land. So, how much space does it actually need?

Well, when working it all out it's important to take note of the yield of each particular foodstuff. That's basically how much produce you get out of each patch of the land and it can vary massively depending on what you're growing, and how good you are at growing it, and where in the world you're doing you're growing, an example when it comes to fulfilling our sugar cravings we can either use sugar cane or sugar beet, though if you opt for sugar cane a square meter of growing space will give you 65 grams of sugar the same area growing sugar beet will reduce one kilo of the sweet stuff. The yield from sugar beet is more than 15 times greater than sugar cane. In the calculations coming up, I have taken some of the highest-yielding crops we use to fulfill our daily diet. So what I'm giving you is our minimum food footprint.

That in itself is fraught with problems, but I'll come back to that. All right are we ready to dive in, here we go, to make the big numbers easier to visualize I'm going to say in that Universal measure of area D 15 square meter American parking space.

The average a person eats around 175 (hundred and seventy-five) eggs a year, a hen can lay twice that amount so one Hen will do for two people. Welfare specialists say she needs at least a square meter, so that makes for half a square meter per person.

Milk comes from cows. We drink 90 liters of milk a year but Daisy cow can produce nearly 8,000 liters a year, meaning one cow can serve 88 people. So, dividing the 6000 square meters that one cow needs by 88 gives an area equivalent to 4.5 (four and a half parking spaces). Unbelievably beef also comes from cows, who knew Daisy’s boyfriend can feed 20 people with roughly 200 kilograms per year of meat from his body. So each person is responsible for 300 square meters of his grazing area, which’s the same as 20 parking spaces.

Pork products account for over 15 kilos of our annual eating and one Pig can provide for four people. So, a quarter of that area total is just 2.5 (two and a half square meters).

Chickens have a lot less meat on them, and it takes about 15 little cluckers to meet our annual poultry needs. These guys together need an area equivalent to one parking space.

Next up seafood. This is a tricky one an average version of us eats nearly 20 kilos of it over the year, but yields very massively if you fancy prawns and that would take a water area of over 3,000 square meters, but if you could settle for the grass carp. The most commonly farmed fish, then a water area off just 3/4 of a square meter would suffice. Now, because I’m calculating the minimum food footprint. We’re going to go for grass carp, whatever that tastes like, fishy; I guess.

We eat seven kilos of pulses like lentils and beans. It’s an allotment favorite because the yield of beans is quite high: you only need one and a quarter parking spaces to meet your pulse quota.

We’ve already said about sugar-taking beat as the highest-yielding sugar crop. You’d need nearly two parking spaces worth to satisfy your sweet tooth over the year.

Next up is oils, among your sunflowers, and your olives, and your ground nuts. One of the highest-yielding plant oils is coconut, but you’d still need five parking spaces of coconut trees to make the 19 kilos of oil that we consume each year. Anyone else feeling a bit greasy.

While Ron liquids our annual alcohol consumption averages roughly 40 liters per year. The space you need depends on your tipple of choice. Making this much wine takes five parking spaces worth, roughly two square meters per bottle. Clear spirits like vodka are made from a mash of grain, and it would take only three parking spaces of wheat to make enough for the year.

So, for our minimum alcohol footprint, we’re going to stick to the hard stuff. Grains like rice, wheat, and maize, make up more than 20% of our diets, and in total, you need to dedicate an area of a hundred and ninety-five square meters that’s equivalent to 13 parking spaces to these cereals. To grow the 64 kilos of potatoes and other starchy vegetables, we need in a year; you need just one extra parking space. Potatoes for the win.

Yields of another veg varies as well if you are happy to only eat tomatoes which I should add would not be a good plan. Then the area needed to grow 136 kilos of them for the year is just two-and-a-half parking spaces.

And finally, fruits. Bananas are some of the most widely consumed fruits in the world, so if your annual fruit quota was May entirely bananas you'd need just one parking space on the plantation. We got there.

So, in total your personal homestead adds up to just over eight hundred and twenty square meters, which’s equivalent to a respectable car park of 55 parking spaces multiply this by these seven and a half billion people currently on the planet and you need an area of at least the size of the Amazon rainforest or 23 times the size of the UK, to meet all of our nutritional needs.

Interestingly about half of that is crops the other half animals. Although Daisy and her boyfriend occupy more than 90% (ninety percent) of the animal half.

Now, these numbers are all well and good in theory, but in reality, there’s a lot of assumptions and generalizations that mean you can’t just turf over the nearest supermarket car park, you can’t for instance. Just fence off an 88th of the space that a dairy cow needs in the hope that like Schrodinger’s cow shall occupy yours and your neighbor’s gardens all at once. Yields also depend on economies of scale. The highest crop yields depend on large-scale commercial farming practices and vast processing facilities that simply aren’t practical for the backyard gardener, and don’t forget the problem of growing coconuts, bananas, and rice and a potentially unsuitable climate and the need to replenish, and revitalize the soil, and the long time the for certain plants reach productive maturity and the food that needs to be grown to feed Daisy and her boyfriend, and yes this is a very rough conservative estimate, but it does at least give an idea of the demand our eating habits are putting on the land with nearly half of that required land dedicated to pastoral farming. You might wonder if it’s better to ditch the animal products altogether.



 Let me know your thoughts in the comment: