Going vegan would get rid of hunger in U.S.: study

More than 41 million Americans are at risk of going hungry at some point during the year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture says.

But new research suggests the country could feed all 327 million Americans, plus about 390 million more, by focusing on plants.

If U.S. farmers took all the land currently devoted to raising cattle, pigs and chickens and used it to grow plants instead, they could sustain more than twice as many people as they do now, according to a report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Ron Milo, a systems biology and sustainability researcher at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, and his co-authors examined Americans’ eating habits and agricultural production from 2000 to 2010.

With the help of computers, they figured out how to remove beef, pork, chicken, dairy and eggs from the American diet and replace them with plant-based foods that were “nutritionally comparable.” Swapping plants for producing beef, for example, would result in enough food to “meet the full dietary needs” of 163 million extra people, the researchers found.

If beef, pork, chicken, dairy and eggs all were replaced by a nutritionally equivalent combination of potatoes, peanuts, soybeans and other plants, the total amount of food available to be eaten would increase by 120 per cent, the researchers calculated.

“The effect of recovering the opportunity food loss is larger than completely eliminating all conventional food losses in the United States,” the authors wrote.