Today's menu

To better understand the average availability of food let’s try to make a day’s diet out of it. Perhaps it would look like this:

• For breakfast you drink tea or coffee with sugar, eat three slices of bread (or cereal based porridge) upon which you use a vegetable oil based margarine and a sweet fruit-based condiment.
• For lunch you eat tortillas, and two potatoes (or yams, cassava or sweet potatoes), with tomatoes and onions fried in vegetable oil. Once a week you also have a fish.
• For dinner you eat boiled rice with a stew of beans, cabbage and a small piece of meat. You round off with a banana, an apple, an orange or half a mango.  
• In the evening you drink a very small soda or a beer and snack on roasted groundnuts or soybeans.

With more elaborated figures it looks like this:

Table 4 Global food supply per capita per day 2009

	grams	kcal	%kcal
Wheat	181	532	19%
Rice	146	536	19%
Maize	47	141	5%
Cereals, other	28	82	3%
Starchy roots (potatoes, cassava etc.)	167	136	5%
Sugar and sweeteners	64	224	8%
Beans and peas	18	62	2%
Soybeans and groundnuts	20	56	2%
Vegetable oils	32	277	10%
Vegetables	361	87	3%
Fruits	200	92	3%
Alcoholic beverages	98	67	2%
Meat	115	230	8%
Animal fats	9	60	2%
Milk	239	134	5%
Fish, seafood	51	33	1%
Other	82	100	3%
Total	1,857	2,849	100%

Source: FAOSTAT

But the average food supply varies greatly geographically. The food supply per Indian is 2,321 kcal while it is 3,688 for the average Ameri­can. The average Indian gets almost two thirds of their calories from cereals, pulses and root crops while these crops only contribute a quarter of the calories of the American. Sugar and fats contribute almost 40% of the American’s calories but just 21% of the Indian’s. Animal products, including fish, make up 28% of the calorie supply of an American but only 9% for the average Indian. Clearly, the agriculture systems that produce those two diets are very different and the ecological footprints of the diets are also very different. 

Extracted from Global Eating Disorder.  

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