Land used to grow 1,000 kilocalories, global average, for each of 38 foods

Name: Land used to grow 1,000 kilocalories, global average, for each of 38 foods
Creator: Unlabeled
License: CC-BY 4.0 for Our World in Data's processing, as it records it; no licence recorded for the origin (Poore and Nemecek, Science 2018)

Beef from beef herds needs 119.5 m² of land a year for 1,000 kcal and lamb 116.7; coffee, next, needs 38.6, and barley, the least hungry for land, 0.2.

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y ↑: Land to grow 1,000 kcal (m² a year)
x →: Food, biggest footprint first

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The data: 38 points

Food, biggest footprint first	Land to grow 1,000 kcal (m² a year)
1	119.5
2	116.7
3	38.6
4	22.7
5	15.8
6	14.9
7	13.3
8	7.3
9	6.6
10	4.7
11	4.6
12	4.4
13	4.2
14	4.2
15	3.2
16	3.2
17	3
18	2.9
19	2.9
20	2.7
21	2.2
22	2.1
23	2
24	1.9
25	1.6
26	1.4
27	1.3
28	1.3
29	1.2
30	1.2
31	1.1
32	0.9
33	0.8
34	0.7
35	0.6
36	0.5
37	0.3
38	0.2

Source: Joseph Poore and Thomas Nemecek (2018), Reducing food's environmental impacts through producers and consumers, Science 360; additional calculations by Our World in Data (chart 'Land use of foods per 1000 kilocalories'); values sorted and rounded by Unlabeled after Tomas Pueyo, Uncharted Territories: How Bread vs Rice Molded History
Licence: CC-BY 4.0 for Our World in Data's processing, as it records it; no licence recorded for the origin (Poore and Nemecek, Science 2018)
Read: 2026-10-22
Drawn: 38 points as the puzzle showed them · bar

Ran in puzzle #28 on October 24, 2026. Play it

Land used to grow 1,000 kilocalories, global average, for each of 38 foods

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