What's Your Food Print?

Ever wonder if you’re treading on the earth as Big Foot or Tweety Bird? It’s not all about your carbon footprint. Cornell University researchers have been looking at something called the Food Print—the amount of land it takes to feed an individual in a given year. The Cornell study specifically looked at various diets in New York and evaluated land-use based only on products grown within the state.

The results were interesting: A single person who follows a low-fat vegetarian diet needs less than a half-acre of land per year to produce all of their food whereas a person who eats a high-fat, high-meat diet needs 2.11 acres in New York. However, a diet with just some added meat and dairy is actually most efficient from a land-use perspective than a pure vegetarian diet due to the type of land they require. Meat and dairy come from animals that can be supported on lower quality land, which is more available, while vegetables need higher quality land. -Denise Shoukas

Denise Shoukas is a regular foodspring.com contributor and is the author of foodspring’s food forager blog.