Would it be possible to feed the world if everyone was vegetarian?
Check out this answer from Consensus:
The research suggests that a global shift to a vegetarian diet could indeed provide enough food to feed the world’s population, potentially up to 10 billion people. This shift would also bring significant environmental and health benefits, contributing to more sustainable agricultural practices and better health outcomes globally.
The question of whether the world could be fed if everyone adopted a vegetarian diet is a significant one, especially in the context of global food security, environmental sustainability, and population growth. This synthesis examines the potential of a global vegetarian diet to meet the nutritional needs of the world’s population based on insights from multiple research papers.
Key Insights
- Sufficient Food Supply with Vegetarian Diet:
- If everyone adopted a vegetarian diet and no food were wasted, there would be enough food to feed 10 billionpeople1.
- Environmental and Sustainability Benefits:
- A global shift to vegetarianism could lead to more environmentally sustainable agricultural practices, reducing the strain on agricultural lands and potentially reversing environmentaldestruction1.
- Health and Global Benefits:
- Adopting a vegetarian diet offers multiple personal health benefits and global benefits, including improved health outcomes and reduced environmentalimpact2.
Would it be possible to feed the world if everyone was vegetarian?
C N Hewitt has answered Near Certain
An expert from Lancaster University in Atmospheric Science
Unless there is a disastrous failure in crop production, it is near certain that there is enough food in the world to feed everyone a vegetarian diet. This would require the human-edible food currently fed to farmed animals to be eaten directly by humans. Not only that, but the current production of crops is sufficient to provide enough food for the projected global population of 9.7 billion in 2050 with a vegan (but not vegetarian) diet. To achieve this, very significant changes to the socio-economic conditions of many (ensuring access to the global food supply) and radical changes to the dietary choices of most (replacing almost all meat and dairy with plant-based alternatives, and greater acceptance of human-edible crops currently fed to animals, especially maize, as directly-consumed human food) would be required.
Current industrialised meat and dairy production, which relies on feeding 34% of human-edible crop calories to animals globally, is highly inefficient in terms of the provision of human nutrition, since it reduces the energy, protein, iron and zinc supplies potentially available to humans from crops, and is incompatible with a sustainable global food system as currently conceived.
We arrive at these conclusions through a quantitative analysis of global and regional food supply to reveal the flows of calories, protein and the micro-nutrients vitamin A, iron and zinc, from production through to human consumption and other end points (Berners-Lee et al, 2018, Current global food production is sufficient to meet human nutritional needs in 2050 provided there is radical societal adaptation. Elem Sci Anth, 6(1), p.52. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1525/elementa.310).
