Food...

While we’re all scrambling to figure out how to deal with the rising cost of food, there’s one statistic that may be a solution: according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, 2.13 billion tons of food are likely to be consumed this year, but only 1.01 billion will be eaten by people. Part of that other 1.12 billion tons will go to ethanol—according to the World Bank, “the grain required to fill the tank of a sports utility vehicle with ethanol… could feed one person for a year” and, as George Monbiot wrote April 18 on Monbiot.com, producing biofuels this year will “consume almost 100 million tons” of cereals.

But, biofuels aren’t the only culprit, 760 million tons of food will be used to feed animals instead of humans, an amount that “could cover the global food deficit 14 times,” wrote Monbiot. People in Asia and Latin America are eating more and more meat, meat consumption in the UK hasn’t changed much since 1974, and the U.S. still reigns supreme in meat eating. Converting meat from grain in the form of a chicken or cow isn’t efficient—it takes 8 kilograms of grain to produce every kilogram of beef, 2 kilograms of feed to produce a kilogram of chicken meat.

The bottom line, though, is this: want to help world hunger? Eat less meat.

Read more in Monbiot’s article Face It, We Aren't All Going to Become Vegetarians on Alternet.org.Image Credit: Stephanie Cleaver.