We are currently growing enough food to feed 10 billion people, and the U.S. alone could feed 800 million people with the grain that livestock eat. Hunger isn’t a scarcity issue, it’s an allocation and distribution issue.
Grain
It takes about 15 pounds of grain to produce 1 pound of beef and about 5 pounds of grain to produce 1 pound of chicken. We grow a lot of grain to feed animals, but we would use less water and other energy resources if we ate the grain ourselves.
In the United States, 70% of the grain grown is fed to farmed animals. Imagine how many people we could feed with that food.
Water
You might be surprised to learn the amount of water used for animal agriculture.
In fact, the meat and dairy industry uses a full third of the entire planet’s fresh water.
Based on a global average of water consumption for beef production, it takes about 460 gallons of water to produce just one quarter pound hamburger.
And dairy isn’t much better, requiring 1,000 gallons of water to produce just one gallon of milk.
This is not only wasteful and inefficient, it is emblematic of a broken system of food production that is simply unsustainable.