Food of the World

How much more food does a hectare of land grow today than it did in 1961? Which countries harvest the most wheat, rice or maize per hectare, and which harvest the least? Which crop delivers the most calories from a field, and which the most protein? What is food actually made of? And which ingredients turn up in the most dishes around the world?

Food of the World answers these questions with numbers, not opinions. Every table and ranking in the book was computed directly from open datasets: a six-decade crop-yield series for eleven crops in more than two hundred countries, the USDA food-composition database of nearly nine thousand foods, a European food table built around Germany's BLS 4.0, and more than six thousand dishes and their ingredients catalogued in Wikidata.

Inside you will find:

- The world's yield record from 1961 to 2018 for wheat, rice, maize, barley, soybeans, potatoes, cassava, beans, peas, bananas and cocoa — which crops tripled, which stalled, and which went backwards in some countries. - Top-15 and bottom-10 country rankings for every crop, with the biggest gains and declines over sixty years. - Continents and twenty sub-regions compared side by side, including the widening maize gap between Africa and the rest of the world. - The spread between high- and low-yield countries, the frontier nations that rank among the best for several crops, and the world's worst harvest years. - Nine thousand foods summarised by group: energy, protein, fat, carbohydrate, fibre, water and sodium. - Nutrient champion tables for protein, fibre, iron, calcium, vitamin C, potassium, magnesium, vitamin A, folate, zinc and selenium. - A field-to-plate calculation of calories and protein per hectare for each crop, showing why maize, rice and cassava feed so many people and why soybeans dominate the world's protein supply. - The countries with the most documented dishes, the world's most-used ingredients, the ingredients shared across the most national cuisines, and the most common ingredient partnerships. - A full country-by-country appendix of 2018 yields for six staples.

Written for curious readers, students, teachers, food lovers and anyone who enjoys seeing the world through data, the book explains every table in plain language and is careful about what the numbers can and cannot tell you. All sources are listed with their licences and attributions.

Compiled by Lilambd Crossing with AI assistance from open datasets.

Made with AI assistance (procedural data + AI-written text): every table was computed by code from the open datasets listed in the book, and the explanatory text was drafted with an AI model and checked against those tables.

Custom data books, tables or charts on commission: hello@lilambd.com