I drive across France fairly frequently. I am always aware of the demands made on agricultural resources by our diet.
The Beauce - an area lying between the Seine and the Loire - is a vast prairie-like monoculture of maize (there are variations due to the need to rotate crops) and further south places like Poitou-Charentes and the Garonne valley have vistas of maize and sorghum and sometimes alfalfa.
Seldom is any livestock seen. When it is it will be, perhaps, half a dozen cows in a grassy field. Cattle - for beef and milk - are found in relatively small areas in Normandy, Brittany and northern France. My guess is that, perhaps, five times the land area is devoted to growing crops than to farming cattle. But this does not mean that the crops are for human consumption, they are not. They mainly are for cattle feed.
Our demand for beef means that cattle are not raised in fields, eating grass but frequently indoors in large number consuming concentrated manufactured cattle feed.
If just a portion of the land used to maize could be devoted to other crops it might be possible to provide people with a richer, varied and interesting diet. I would welcome this - and I am a carnivore ...
