Vegans are not picky but they choose their foods carefully to minimize their negative impact on the world. And one of those impacts is related to world hunger.
The more meat we eat, the less food there is to feed other people. This is because farmed animals are not efficient converters of feed to meat and we get fewer calories from meat, milk and eggs than we feed to the animals. It is incredibly wasteful. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization puts it this way: ‘When livestock are raised in intensive systems, they convert carbohydrates and protein that might otherwise be eaten directly by humans and use them to produce a smaller quantity of energy and protein.’1
In all, one-third of the world’s cereal harvest and 70 percent of the world’s soy harvest2 is fed to farmed animals. If these crops were made available to people instead, we could feed the whole world using less land3 and eradicate world hunger today.