Sale:: The world runs on surprisingly few foods

Wednesday, February 25, 2026

The world runs on surprisingly few foods


	February 25, 2026

Original photo by Natalia Blauth/ Unsplash+

Just 12 plants and five animal species generate 75% of the world's food.

There are at least 30,000 edible plant species in the world, the vast majority of which aren't commonly eaten. Agricultural biodiversity is in decline, with 75% of the world's food coming from just 12 plants and five animal species. Of that percentage, the majority comes from widespread staple crops (including wheat, rice, sugarcane, corn, and soy), while a much smaller share comes from cattle, chicken, sheep, pigs, and goats.

Those are striking statistics, but they're also a bit of a warning. The more we rely on a smaller and smaller number of plant and animal species, the more susceptible those food sources are to disease — essentially, we're putting all our eggs in too few baskets. Plant breeders are combating that risk via gene-editing tools such as CRISPR, which allow them to select for desirable genes that make crops more resilient to climate change and disease.

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		Numbers Don't Lie

Plant species cultivated at a significant scale

170

Kernels on an average ear of corn

800

Farms in America

1.88 million

Years it takes one pineapple to grow

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The world's largest plant is an Australian seagrass.

The world's largest plant by area wasn't discovered until 2022, but it was hiding in plain sight all along. A specimen of Posidonia australis seagrass, also known as Poseidon's ribbon weed, covers 77 square miles of Australia's Shark Bay — enough space for 28,000 soccer fields. It's also quite old (about 4,500 years, researchers from the University of Western Australia and Flinders University estimate), and no one knows how it's lasted as long as it has, especially since it could be sterile. Species that can't reproduce tend to have reduced genetic diversity, which reduces their ability to cope with environmental change. One theory relates to Shark Bay itself, a World Heritage Site that has remained largely untouched by the outside world, making it an ideal environment for seagrass to continue growing for thousands of years.