Dissemin is shutting down on January 1st, 2025

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National Academy of Sciences, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 15(115), p. 3804-3809, 2018

DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1713820115

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The opportunity cost of animal based diets exceeds all food losses

Journal article published in 2018 by Alon Shepon, Gidon Eshel ORCID, Elad Noor ORCID, Ron Milo ORCID
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Abstract

Significance 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.