Cornell Study Assesses "Food Print" Related to Consumption, Diets

Researchers at Cornell University have taken a close look at which type of diet needs the most, and the least, amount of land to support it. They found that a low-fat vegetarian diet is very efficient in so far as how much land it requires, but it is not as efficient as a diet that also includes a small amount of meat.

They equated their findings out to the fact that if everyone in New York State were to follow a low-fat vegetarian diet, the farm land in the state could support close to 50% more people than it can now, which amounts to about 32% of the current population of the state. With the high meat diet that most people follow today, the state is able to feed 22% of the population without having to get food from the other states.

The researchers compared a total of 42 diets that all contained the same amount of calories. They also had the same core products of grains, fruits, vegetables and dairy products, all of which can be grown and produced in New York State. The only variables in the diets were the amount of meat and fats. The meat ranged from none to 13.4 ounces a day and fat which ranged 20 to 45% of the total daily calorie count. They then designed an agricultural land footprint for each diet.

There was five times the difference between the diets that came in on the opposite ends of the scale.

Someone who follows the low fat vegetarian diet needs less that a half acre of land per person per year top produce all the food they need. The one on the opposite end of the scale is the high fat, high meat, diet and in this case, each person needs 2.11 acres to produce their food.

But a diet that adds just a little bit of meat is still more efficient than the vegetarian one because of the type of land it uses, not only the acreage.

Fruits, veggies and grains need high quality crop land to grow, Meat and dairy products come from animals that can be supported on lower quality land which is also more available than the high quality land. In other words, although a vegetarian diet uses less land overall, it uses more high quality land than a diet with just a bit of meat added, making the meat added diet more efficient when all the variables are considered.

Even though a moderate-fat plant-based diet with a little meat and dairy (red footprint) uses more land than the all-vegetarian diet (far left footprint), it feeds more people because it uses more pasture land, which is widely available.

Credit: Steve Rokitka/University Communications

Copyright: Cornell University