What Is The Most Popular Food In The World?

You love pizza and ice cream. You love sushi and apples too. They taste so good don’t they?

But none of these is anywhere near the most popular food in the world.

And You may be shocked to learn that this most popular food in the world, is kinda bland.

When we talk about the most popular food in the world, we have to distinguish between the most popular in terms of what people actually consume vs. most desired food in the world

(which does not necessarily mean that it is most consumed, because it may be too expensive like ice cream….or may be more of a treat than a staple food…like chocolate)

So let’s look at foods that are the most consumed by the world.

Let’s look at corn first. The world produces more corn than any other single food in the world.

If you go to the Midwest of the USA, You will find miles and miles of farmland with nothing but corn growing on it. I used to wonder as a kid, growing up in Michigan, who the heck is eating all this corn.

There is more of it in the world than any other food. And big portion of it is produced in the United States.

Well, it turns out, most of the corn is not consumed by humans, but by animals. It is used for animal feed. used in farming beef, pork, chicken, etc.

So if you are a meat eater, you consume it indirectly. Most of the rest is used to make ethanol, corn oil, and corn syrup.

A very small portion of it is actually eaten directly by people

The food that is the most popular, that is, the most eaten by humans is the second biggest crop in the world is…and what is that? Wait for it…wait for it…it is rice.

Rice is the most important source of calories for human beings. People on average eat as much rice as their weight every year.

The average person in the world weighs about 137 lbs, (I weigh much more than that, unfortunately) – but 137lbs happens to be almost exactly what we consume per year on average.

This varies of course depending on the region you live in. Asians consume much more rice than we North Americans.

But good old plain rice give us humans about 20% of our total calorie intake, on average.

Rice is so important to our human diet that If we didn’t have rice, a lot of people might actually starve.