Live and Learn 5much additional food will be needed have varied, ranging from half to
twice as much as existing levels.
For those wanting to turn out more food, these statistics provide
the perfect justification: more people means that more food is needed,
which calls for greater food production. To disagree is to line up on the
wrong side of humanity. Researchers seeking grants, countries wanting
loans from international banks, and nonprofit organizations seeking
donations all fall back on this assumption.
In addition, agribusinesses use it to rationalize new fertilizer plants
or to market more pesticides. Politicians leverage it to secure votes or
defend taxpayer subsidies. Farmers use it to reinforce existing production
practices. When it comes to propping up modern food systems around
the world, the question is not so much who relies on such statements as
fact, but who doesn’t.
But the idea that more people require greater production presumes
there is barely enough food in the world as is. The related presumption
is that food is already efficiently produced, distributed, and consumed.
Backers of this idea show us images of starving children, not the two
billion plus who are overweight or obese where food is readily abundant
and needlessly wasted.
Indeed, food waste is chronic. Across the world, from one-third to
one-half of food grown is never consumed at all. In developing coun-
tries, more than 40 percent of loss happens near the farm in storage,
transportation, and processing. In countries like the United States, less
food is lost on the front end, while more is wasted in stores, restaurant
tables, and home refrigerators, where up to 40 percent is never eaten.
The food system converts different kinds of energy into edible
calories, but Western diets squander most of that energy. Two-thirds of
the energy harvested from cropland goes to feed animals, not people.
Energy within grains and forage are transformed by animals into fat and
muscle, but not before most of it is lost in the conversion or used to fuel
the animals’ metabolism. After taking into account all the energy loses
from feed to food, only a small percentage of edible calories remain:
from chickens, about percent; hogs, around 0 percent; cattle, in the
neighborhood of percent.
People choose to eat meat and fat because of their genetics and
culture, not because meat and fat are efficient sources of delivering edible