What Do People Eat?
It took a bit of digging, but I found stats on what people all over the world eat. These numbers come from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Specifically, I got them from the Food Supply sections of the Agricultural data in the FAOSTATS database. It would be nice to do it by country and put it all into map form using something like DIY Map, but for now I’ll just provide a table listing the data by continent.
This table shows the percentage of average daily calories per capita that come from various foods. The top section shows the breakdown between animal and vegetable foods, while the bottom section breaks it down even further into specific foods. The FAO db will let you break it down even further, but I didn’t want the table to be too big. So, where do people on the various continents get their calories?
| world | usa | europe | oceania | near east | south america | asia | africa | |
| vegetal products | 0.83 | 0.72 | 0.70 | 0.70 | 0.89 | 0.79 | 0.86 | 0.93 |
| animal products | 0.17 | 0.28 | 0.30 | 0.30 | 0.11 | 0.21 | 0.14 | 0.07 |
| cereals - excluding beer | 0.47 | 0.22 | 0.28 | 0.24 | 0.56 | 0.32 | 0.55 | 0.50 |
| vegetable oils | 0.09 | 0.17 | 0.13 | 0.11 | 0.09 | 0.10 | 0.08 | 0.08 |
| sugar & sweeteners | 0.09 | 0.18 | 0.11 | 0.13 | 0.09 | 0.17 | 0.06 | 0.06 |
| meat | 0.08 | 0.12 | 0.12 | 0.14 | 0.04 | 0.11 | 0.07 | 0.03 |
| starchy roots | 0.05 | 0.03 | 0.04 | 0.07 | 0.02 | 0.05 | 0.04 | 0.14 |
| milk - excluding butter | 0.04 | 0.10 | 0.09 | 0.09 | 0.04 | 0.06 | 0.03 | 0.03 |
| alcoholic beverages | 0.02 | 0.04 | 0.05 | 0.04 | 0.00 | 0.02 | 0.02 | 0.02 |
| animal fats | 0.02 | 0.03 | 0.06 | 0.04 | 0.01 | 0.02 | 0.02 | 0.01 |