Schön, A.-M.; Böhringer, M. Land Consumption for Current Diets Compared with That for the Planetary Health Diet—How Many People Can Our Land Feed? Sustainability2023, 15, 8675.
Schön, A.-M.; Böhringer, M. Land Consumption for Current Diets Compared with That for the Planetary Health Diet—How Many People Can Our Land Feed? Sustainability 2023, 15, 8675.
Schön, A.-M.; Böhringer, M. Land Consumption for Current Diets Compared with That for the Planetary Health Diet—How Many People Can Our Land Feed? Sustainability2023, 15, 8675.
Schön, A.-M.; Böhringer, M. Land Consumption for Current Diets Compared with That for the Planetary Health Diet—How Many People Can Our Land Feed? Sustainability 2023, 15, 8675.
Abstract
The way people in many countries eat today is disconnected to the resources and land locally available. In Europe, for instance, too much meat is eaten, but often cannot be fed by local resources. The percentage of non-local and non-seasonal food is tremendous, exploiting other regions and their water reservoirs. Current diets harm eco systems and people’s health. (Re-)regionalising food systems and aligning diets to planetary boundaries could be one way to reconnect people to the food they eat. Before demanding the (re-)regionalisation of food, it should be analysed whether current consumption patterns can be met at all with the regionally available agricultural land. We looked at the region Hesse in Central Germany, calculated and compared land consumption of current diets with the consumption as recommended by the Planetary Health Diet. Our focus is on livestock because land consumption to produce meat, dairy and eggs is relatively high. Our results show that the region is far from being able to feed the current livestock population, that it does not have the land to support the livestock needed to meet current consumption patterns, but that it could support a smaller livestock population according to the Planetary Health Diet, especially if farmers adopt crop rotation systems and extensive husbandry.
Keywords
self-sufficiency degree; planetary health diet; land consumption; food sovereignity; livestock; consumption
Subject
Business, Economics and Management, Economics
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
