Ever wonder just how much food a human eats in a year? The answer is a pretty impressive number of pounds, 31 of which is cheese, cheese, cheese. From Allison Aubrey on NPR's food blog, the Salt:

But what are most Americans really eating? A lot of cheese, sweets, and dense potatoes and grains.

So how does it break out? The figure is a little hard to swallow: 1,996 pounds, or nearly one ton. This is an estimate of how much — by weight — the average American eats over the course of one year.

The figure comes from economists who crunched food consumption data collected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

If you start with dairy, we consume about 630 pounds of milk, yogurt, cheese and ice cream per year. About 31 pounds of cheese alone sailed down our gullets.

Read the full blog post here