Eating less food—whole food and junk food, meat and plants, organic and conventional, GMO and non-GMO—would do a lot more than just better our personal health.
The average American now eats a literal ton of food—1,996 pounds—per year. Between 1970 and 2000, Americans increased daily caloric intake by 24.5 percent. That’s the equivalent of an extra 530 calories—a Big Mac—per day. It’s thus an empirical fact that the vast majority of Americans—hearty folk who consume about 3,000 calories daily—should cut back.
By virtue of where our calories derive, a reduction in daily calories would disproportionately lower our intake of foods that are the most resource intensive.
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An additional benefit of eating less food is environmental. By virtue of where our calories derive, a reduction in daily calories would disproportionately lower our intake of foods that are the most resource intensive. Americans today consume about 57 percent more meat than we did in the 1950s. We eat four times more cheese, 20 times more yogurt, eight times more corn sweeteners, and 18 percent more wheat flour. All of these goods require more resources to produce and they emit more greenhouse gasses than their lower-impact counterparts—namely fruits and vegetables.
But as far as produce goes, Americans have only increased our consumption of them modestly since the 1950s. Total fruit consumption had risen by a comparatively low 21 percent between 1950 and 2000, while total vegetable consumption has gone up 25 percent (a big portion of that increase, though, is due to tomatoes used for pizzas). One study concluded that if Americans reduced caloric intake to 2,000 calories per day, the carbon “foodprint” of the American diet would drop by 11 percent.
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A famous 25-year study on primates and calorie intake published in 2013 found that monkeys eating a restricted diet (by 30 percent) live longer and endure fewer age-related diseases. The results were by no means fully conclusive, but they led the New York Times to observe that “there is no doubt that with an overweight population, a 10 percent reduction in body weight would have tremendous health benefits.” Eating less food—whole food and junk food, meat and plants, organic and conventional, GMO and non-GMO—would help accomplish that goal while tempering the endless debate about what exactly we should be eating.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/02/sc...vity.html?_r=0
There are also animal welfare benefits to cutting back. In a strictly utilitarian sense, the welfare of farm animals comes down to numbers. Eating animals requires slaughtering over 10 billion sentient farm animals a year in the U.S. The Humane Resource Council found that 75 percent of Americans agree that we should “eliminate all forms of animal cruelty and suffering.” Until we determine how to painlessly kill farm animals, eating them will undeniably involve harming them. Because so much of our caloric intake today comes from animals and animal products, a caloric reduction alone would automatically reduce the demand for animal products and thus the suffering of farm animals. Eating 2,000 calories a day instead of 3,000 calories would, in and of itself, likely have a greater impact on reducing demand for animal products than Meatless Mondays.
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But the pursuit of food reform through caloric reduction mines a much deeper issue in a way other solutions do not. The most important—and most radical—benefit of advocating a reduction in caloric intake is that it would equate food reform with social justice. Specifically, if applied effectively, it would minimize navel-gazing foodie discussions among the educated elite—people like me (and likely you) who tend to view food choices as a form of identity politics—and focus on those who have the least culinary choice and are, as it turns out, the most victimized by a calorically dense food system.
Well-educated foodies, those who dominate the high-profiled discussions and read Pacific Standard and Modern Farmer and Cook’s Illustrated, are in relative dietary control.
All of the vocal debates that we now have about food—veganism, organic agriculture, GMOs, humanely raised this-or-that—are thus superseded by the question of socio-economic justice. Achieving genuine food reform today means focusing not necessarily on the Farm Bill or soda taxes or GMO labeling, but on the rudiments of social and economic justice. We need to look at the minimum wage, the right to unionize, health care, and a working culture in which the CEO-to-worker salary ratio is 331 to 1. Without bringing these themes into the debate—something an emphasis on caloric reduction would allow us to do—there will never be food justice, at least not for those who need it the most.
There’s systematic injustice between what we want to happen with the food system and how the system now operates. If the most effective start we can initiate is to eat less food—and I think it is—we need to look beyond the fact that we eat like pigs—or even that we eat pigs—to the underlying causes of that desperate gluttony.
Eat Less You Pig
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It's not easy, I know, but one tries the best they can. There are various reasons why people living in the cities, eating from the food that was produced in the factories (sometimes working in them too) not far from where they live are participating in all these strikes. 
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