The opportunity cost of animal based diets exceeds all food losses

This article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows how growing plant-based food to replace animal-based foods can produce 2x to 20x more nutrition per unit of crop land, and complete replacement of animal-based products would produce more benefit than attempting to eliminate all supply chain losses:

With a third of all food production lost via leaky supply chains or spoilage, food loss is a key contributor to global food insecurity. Demand for resource-intensive animal-based food further limits food availability. In this paper, we show that plant-based replacements for each of the major animal categories in the United States (beef, pork, dairy, poultry, and eggs) can produce twofold to 20-fold more nutritionally similar food per unit cropland. Replacing all animal-based items with plant-based replacement diets can add enough food to feed 350 million additional people, more than the expected benefits of eliminating all supply chain food loss.

Link to full article:

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/03/20/1713820115