The New Minimum Baseline

My second core value is that I want to leave the world a better place than I found it. So when I heard claims that eating meat wasn’t sustainable, I had to investigate.

Turns out meat production in its current form is massively inefficient.

As David Attenborough bluntly put it:

“The planet can’t support billions of large meat-eaters. There just isn’t the space. If we all had a largely plant-based diet, we would need only half the land we use at the moment.”
— Sir David Attenborough [1]

The Land-Use Bottleneck

It is insane that we have to dedicate vast amounts of land, water, and energy to raise an animal for food when we can just skip the middle mammal and eat the plants directly.

• Earth's surface29%71%
  • 29% Land141M km²
  • 71% Ocean369M km²
• Land surface76%14%
  • 76% Habitable land107M km²
  • 14% Barren land20M km²
  • 10% Glaciers14M km²
• Habitable land45%38%13%
  • 45% Agriculture48M km²
  • 38% Forests40M km²
  • 13% Shrub14M km²
  • 3% Water bodies3M km²
  • 1% Urban1M km²
• Agricultural land80%16%
  • 80% Livestock: meat, dairy, textiles38M km²
  • 16% Crops for food8M km²
  • 4% Non-food crops2M km²
• Global calorie supply17%83%
  • 17% Meat & dairy
  • 83% Plant-based food
• Global protein supply38%62%
  • 38% Meat & dairy
  • 62% Plant-based food

Source: Our World in Data: Global land use for food production. Calories and protein include farmed fish.

If you look at the breakdown of global land use:

• Row 1 - Total Earth Surface: 71% is ocean, 29% is land.
• Row 2 - Habitable Land: 76% of all land is habitable (the rest is glaciers, barren land, and deserts).
• Row 3 - Agricultural Land: 46% of habitable land is used for agriculture.

Here is where it’s wildly inefficient. Of that total agricultural land, 80% is used for livestock (grazing and growing feed), while only 16% is used for crops to feed humans directly.

Despite utilising the whopping 80% of our agricultural land, look at the actual output we get in return:

• Calories: 83% of the world’s calories come from plants. Only 17% come from meat and dairy.
• Protein: 62% of the world’s protein comes from plants. Only 38% comes from meat and dairy.

We use 80% of our land to get a 17% calorie return. This wastefull conversion of energy is a primary driver of global deforestation, climate change, and biodiversity loss.

You can see that we get so much more from plants directly than passing them through animals. To cut emissions, water, and land use, we simply need to raise fewer animals and feed their crops directly to people.

My 95% Compromise: The “Social Flexitarian”

Following this revelation the most practical lifestyle for me that I would follow became being plant-based at home and flexible when out. Turns out there is a name for this approach:

Social Flexitarian: Eating plant-based at home by default, while keeping meat on the table for restaurants, travel, and social events.

By keeping my kitchen 100% plant-based during the week and saving meat strictly for social gatherings or travel (around 1–2 meals a week), my diet would naturally shift from the 80% default to ~95% plant-based.

That single habit could wipe out nearly all of the environmental footprint caused by my daily meals, while letting me stay frictionless at social functions.

This 95% mark is what I would call my Minimum Baseline

If it weren’t for the ethics in the next step, I would have stopped here.