“If you know one landscape well, you will look at all other landscapes differently.” – Anne Michaels
A+P 76: Make Space at Your Table for Nature
Hello again!
Last week I wrote about my Big Five Solutions – local adventures, food, simplifying life, land access, and rewilding.
I’ve set myself a loose goal of trying to do five interesting and overlapping things for each of them this year.
In a couple of weeks, I’m off to chat to a farmer about her grass-fed beef, pork, eggs & lamb. But today’s outing saw me heading to my local Five Guys restaurant to explore how much land our lunch requires…
Five Guys Feast for my Five Solutions
When I began reading about the impact food has on the planet, what astonished me most was how much land is used to feed us all. Agriculture is generally terrible for nature (not always), so the less land we farm, the better.
So What?
But what does this mean? Why does it matter? Let’s now turn to a different meal I often cook at home or order in Chinese restaurants: Mapo Tofu with rice.
Here’s how much farmland is needed to make this, washed down with a glass of oat milk.
A Stunning Realisation
The area marked out in chalk was the area of farmland needed for my first meal.
The area of the table alone is all that is needed to produce this second meal.
However, to ensure a fair comparison, I needed to match the calories and protein. That meant I could produce multiple plates of Mapo Tofu for the same land area.
Final Thoughts
I was astonished when I realised that just changing my lunch could free up so much space for nature and rewilding while still filling me up, keeping me healthy, tasting delicious, and saving me money.
- You can learn more about the land requirements of different foods here.
Boring but Important Disclaimers
* I kept things simple, looking only at beef, bacon, cheese, bread, and milk. I used Five Guys nutrition info to calculate land use based on protein and calories.
If you’d like to explore this in more detail, I recommend the brilliant Our World in Data site.
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