What it takes to feed one average American — in calories, kilograms, acres, gallons, kilowatt-hours, and kilograms of CO₂e — by the day, by the month, by the year, and by what's actually on the plate. Built from USDA ERS, NASS, USGS, EPA and EIA primary data, with every derivation documented in the corpus model files.
Beef is 5% of food mass — but 77% of the cropland footprint, 32% of the water footprint, and 40% of diet greenhouse gases. It is the only lever that moves the model by tens of percent.
Shifting the same 2,450 kcal/day toward the Dietary Guidelines pattern trims the land footprint from 1.92 to 1.86 acres; deeper protein shifts (EAT-Lancet-style, vegetarian) move land, water and GHG by 30–70%. No packaging, transport, or waste intervention approaches this range — food miles are real but small; the protein portfolio is structural. The tables below show exactly where each footprint sits.
The same finding, as a picture. The plate on the left is one person's food — switch what it's weighed in, and watch the wedges move: a sliver of beef on the plate becomes most of the field. Hover or tap anything (wedges, bars, chips) for its numbers in the current time view; click to pin.
Each bar is 100% of that measure for one person. Cropland stays annual (a standing footprint). Added fats & oils have no matched land or water intensity in any source, so they are absent from those two bars — a flagged gap, not a zero. Every value here is also in the table below; shares are computed from those twelve rows exactly as shown (the "roughly" figures in the next section fold in source-level residual lines, so they can differ by a few points). Colors mark food family (warm = animal, green = plant, blue = mixed added fats), and the palette passes the colorblind-separation checks in both themes.
One person's food, split into the groups the sources actually measure. Bars show each food's share of the column's largest value. Every animal row is marked — the plant rows are the vegetarian's footprint, near enough.
| Food | Mass | Land (m²/yr) | Water | Greenhouse gases |
|---|
Computed from the table: animal foods carry roughly 95% of the diet's cropland-and-pasture footprint, 68% of its water footprint, and 82% of its greenhouse gases, from about 38% of its mass. Land is a standing footprint and stays annual in every view.
Sources & boundaries. Masses: USDA ERS Loss-Adjusted Food Availability (composite of latest years, 2010–2023), meat aggregate split by ERS availability shares. Land: Poore & Nemecek (2018) global intensities × LAFA masses — converges within 1.5% of USDA ERS ERR-273's U.S. top-down figure. Water: Mekonnen & Hoekstra (2012) global green+blue+grey intensities — mostly rainfall ("green") water; U.S. blue-water accounting uses ERR-273. GHG: Heller & Keoleian (U-M CSS20-01) U.S. diet LCA; their small residual lines (lamb 12.2, soy 3.0, legumes 2.8, veal 0.4 kg CO₂e/yr) are omitted from the rows. Added fats & oils carry no matched land/water intensity in any source — shown as n.a. rather than guessed. Full derivations: corpus files 01–03, 05.
Where the calories come from — and how the actual plate compares with the Dietary Guidelines pattern. Americans under-eat fruit, dairy and vegetables, and over-eat protein foods, added fats and added sugars.
| Food group | Calories | Share of calories | vs DGA target |
|---|
Calories: ERS LAFA, loss-adjusted, composite of each group's latest year. DGA comparison: Healthy U.S.-Style Pattern at 2,000 kcal (DGA 2020–2025, Table 1-1) against LAFA food-pattern equivalents — vegetables at 71% of target, fruit 41%, dairy 49%, grains 111%, protein foods 145%, oils 237%, added sugars 173% of the <10%-of-calories limit.
The corpus carries measured intake by food group (LAFA) and macronutrient targets (DGA/DRI); a measured macronutrient split of the actual U.S. diet would come from NHANES, which is a flagged Phase 2 addition — LAFA and NHANES are known to diverge for several groups, so the two are not silently merged here.
The same person, eating differently. Guideline eating is nearly resource-neutral — and needs more water. The big movements all run through the animal rows above.
| Diet pattern | Agricultural land (acres/person/yr) |
Freshwater (gal/person/yr) |
Diet GHG (kg CO₂e/person/yr) |
Reading |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Current U.S. diet | 1.92 | 94,270 | 1,819 | The baseline everywhere on this page. ERS ERR-273 · Heller & Keoleian |
| DGA "Healthy U.S.-Style" | 1.86 (−3%) | 108,931 (+16%) | 1,812 (−0.4%) | Healthier, not greener: more fruit, veg & dairy means more irrigation in the arid West. ERS ERR-273 |
| Half the animal products | n.a. | n.a. | 1,189 (−35%) | Heller & Keoleian scenario 3. U-M CSS20-01 |
| Half the animal products + 90% less beef | n.a. | n.a. | 891 (−51%) | Cutting beef specifically doubles the effect of cutting animal foods generally. U-M CSS20-01 |
| EAT-Lancet reference diet | 0.57–0.96 (−49 to −70%) | n.a. | ≈947 (−68%)* | Mostly-plant pattern with 14 g/day red meat; the range depends on how much of that is beef. EAT-Lancet × Poore & Nemecek |
| Vegetarian (lacto/ovo) | 0.32–0.35 (−82%) | n.a. | n.a. | Peters et al.: this land footprint would let U.S. farmland carry 807 million people vs 402 million on the current diet. Peters et al. 2016, Elementa |
*GHG for EAT-Lancet is computed on the Poore & Nemecek basis so the ratio against the current diet is internally consistent (2,919 → 947 kg); on that same basis the current diet reads 2,919, not 1,819 — the two columns are anchored to Heller's U.S.-specific values, and only percent changes should be carried across. Water n.a. rows: no published U.S. water attribution exists for those patterns — a flagged gap, not a zero.
The same per-capita basis, multiplied honestly: a household of four, a small town, a city, a metropolis. Linear scalings of the sourced per-capita values — county-level self-sufficiency varies enormously around them.
| Quantity | 1 person | Family of 4 | Town of 5,000 | City of 100,000 | Metropolis of 1,000,000 |
|---|
Land stays annual in every view (a standing footprint). Basis values and their primary sources: calories & mass — ERS LAFA; land — ERS ERR-273; water — ERR-273, EPA WaterSense, USGS FS 2018-3035; energy — ERS food-system energy; GHG — Heller & Keoleian, U-M CSS20-01.
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