Trying to gage the nutrition value of botanical food supply, I am looking for ready data on or the way to estimate the world’s total protein load of fabaceae vs. poaceae.
Does it seem that fabaceae is the world’s richest botanical food stock in protein?
human food, or food in general?
does this assume that we everything we grow could be eaten? for example, we produce a lot of corn, but a lot of that goes to energy or animal feed, not human food.
This might be of use. I was sent it as a pdf so don’t know how available it is online.
Iyer, Bestwick, Duncan & Russell 2021. Invasive plants are a valuable alternate protein source. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, vol. 5.
Doi 10.3389/fsufs.2021.575056
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If you are so inclined, you can download statistics on total production of different crops from FAO. You can then access the protein content of each of these from USDA and calculate the total protein. You need to take a bit of care in selecting the right product from the USDA database, but you should be able to get a pretty good answer to your question with a day’s work or less. As @pisum has mentioned, a surprisingly large proportion of crop production is not consumed by humans, but fed to livestock or used for other purposes (e.g. maize, soybeans).
You’re going to have trouble with that as it’s difficult to find wide-ranging data one plant protein loads that’s not focused on human diets.
There will also be individual plants that break the larger pattern of which families are the most protein rich.
as in protein in human food.
Yes, corn (maize) is food, technical botanical, but not a source of protein.
You helped me sharpen up the method of tallying up. I think the method albeit very meticulous, would be(1) summing up fabaceae harvests for each country, (2) figuring out an average for peas, soy, chickpeas for each country, (3) calculating the protein load for all the protein harvests per country.
Maize has about 9 g of protein per 100 g dry matter, and given it is one of the most widely-produced crops, you would definitely want to include it in your calculations, as well as wheat, rice, etc. which also contain some protein.
FAO gives statistics per country as well, if you want to calculate on a country-by-country basis.
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