A billion humans around the world, 85% of them children, are starving and malnourished because of ANIMAL AGRICULTURE. Plant-based foods feed far more people using far fewer resources including land, water and energy. A whopping 80% of all agricultural land is used for livestock production, making it the single greatest driver of deforestation and biodiversity loss globally. 1g of protein from beef or lamb requires nearly 100x more land than is needed to produce 1g of protein from peas or tofu. In order to eat farmed animals, we have to grow the crops or forage necessary to feed them. This amounts to vastly more crops (or pasture, if the animals are grazed) than it would take to feed humans directly. Compounding this inefficiency is the fact that only a small fraction of the plant energy consumed by an animal is converted into edible protein. Most of the energy from crops fed to farmed animals is used to fuel their own metabolism, with only a fraction of those grains and other plants being turned into meat. To give one example, it takes 25 pounds of grain to yield just one pound of beef — while crops such as soy and lentils produce, pound for pound, as much protein as beef, and sometimes more. On a global level, about 75% of the overall soy production weight is used for animal feed. Feeding all of these animals means that currently less than half the world’s cereal grains— including wheat, rice, rye, oats, barley, corn, and sorghum— are consumed by humans. Farmed animals are fed a staggering 41% of the world’s cereal grain production. To put this in greater perspective, the United Nations estimates we could feed an additional 3.5 billion more people simply by growing crops for human consumption on the land that is currently used to grow feed crops for farmed animals. Research citations: Hannah Ritchie, 2021 “If the world adopted a plant-based diet, we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares”, and Nellemann, C., MacDevette, M., Manders, T., Eickhout, B., Svihus, B., Prins, A. G., Kaltenborn, B. P., “The environmental food crisis – The environment’s role in averting future food crises.” A UNEP rapid response assessment. United Nations Environment Programme 2009.