Make Space at Your Table for Nature


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"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...

Please understand that I was only eating a delicious burger for the sake of you, dear readers. (Back in my pre-vegan days I used to love a bit of Five Guys!)

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.

The photo below shows the area of farmland required* for my bacon cheeseburger with fries and a milkshake. (I hope you appreciate what a kind man I am, scoffing all this in order to make a point to you...):

So What?

But what does this mean? Why does it matter? Is that a lot of land, not much, or just the unalterable reality of me existing and being hungry (and hopefully neither of those things will change any time soon)?

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 (I strongly recommend drinking beer with this meal, rather than random oat milk, but I wanted to keep the comparisons simple and healthy 😃):

I haven't made a mistake in sharing the same photo twice.

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, in order to make the comparison valid, I needed to ensure each meal provided equal calories and protein.

Which actually meant that in order to match the burger meal, you can produce this many plates of my second meal for an area of farmland the size of my table...

I was astonished when I realised just changing my lunch could free up so much space for nature and rewilding, whilst still filling me up, keeping me healthy, tasting delicious, and saving me money.

I love making space at my table for nature.

You can learn more about the land requirements of different foods here.

Boring but important explanations and disclaimers!

* - I kept things very simple, just looking at beef, bacon, cheese, bread, and milk, and using the nutrition info from Five Guys to calculate how much land is needed to produce that much protein and calories. Luckily for my GCSE maths, the numbers came out about the same, with an average of 58.6 square metres.

I know this is all very simplified – it doesn't differentiate between grain fed / soy fed beef, or organic milk, for starters. It also implicitly ignores the potential alternative usefulness of the land where this food was made: was it marginal uplands, or lush lowlands etc., and the positive benefits of regenerative agriculture.

If you'd like to explore all these things in a far deeper way, I recommend the brilliant Our World in Data site.