The latest buzz phrase is “food print”, the amount of land needed to supply one person’s nutritional needs for a year. With the world population growing by an estimated half a billion every decade, and a concomitant loss of agricultural land to housing and development, it’s not hard to understand why this has become a hot topic.
The term was coined by researchers at Cornell University in New York state, who found that a person who followed a low-fat vegetarian diet would need less than half an acre per year to produce their food. A high-fat diet with a lot of meat, on the other hand, needed 2.1 acres. They concluded, however, that the most efficient diet was one that married the two, as raising livestock made productive use of less fertile ground unsuitable for growing crops.
