What the World Eats

National Geographic brings us an interactive data visualization project that breaks down world food consumption. As you can see, globally, we consume more grains than anything. The staff of life, you know. At the site, you can mouseover the graph and break these categories down further: rice beats out wheat, just barely, with maize (corn) a distant third. But the United States’ graph is quite different, with sugar and fat taking up 37% of our diet! There are also plenty of graphs on meat consumption, which has grown considerably per capita over the past few decades. Not so much in the U.S., as we always ate more meat than other countries, and not so much in India, where meat eating is still relatively rare. There are plenty of graphs to explore and compare at NatGeo.