How much food will we need?

We'll focus on calories consumed by people. 11e15 kcal/year consumption in 2050 sounds about right, which is a 40% increase from 2022.

Total caloric consumption

As people grow richer, they eat more:

Total caloric consumption has grown from 6.5e15 kcal/year (2010) to 7.8e15 kcal/year (2022), a 20% increase while total GDP has grown 39% in that time period. And these numbers are from countries with about 90% of world population, so they're probably still underestimating caloric consumption.

van Dijk21 (meta-analysis) projects 7.1e15 kcal/year consumption (2022), which is an underestimate by at least 10%. That's suspicious given this was published in 2021... It's not too outlandish given their spread though.

They project 10.5e12 kcal/year consumption (2050).

Total caloric production

Instead of focusing on calories consumed, we can calculate total crop caloric production (crops produced + imported - exported). Tilman11 projects 24.8e15 kcal/year production (2050). Their calculations aren't super tight though; they calculated total demand by taking FAOSTAT data on crop demand and then converting to caloric demand using crop- and nation-specific conversion factors. van Dijk21 is suspicious of applying broad conversion factors for both animal feed and human consumption use of crops.