Silly Little Errors--NYTimes

Sometimes writers make silly little errors, just because they aren't thinking. Paul Greenbury in today's NYTimes Magazine on the rise of fish farming--Green to the Gills:

"As anyone who has flown over the monocultured American heartland will attest, we have carried out a policy of biological purification with the organisms we eat — an elimination of the random in favor of the predictable. The vast majority of the world's land area has been repurposed to cultivate the several dozen creatures we like."

But the CIA World Factbook says that 13.31 percent of the world's land acrea is arable, with another 4.71 percent devoted to permanent crops. Even in the U.S., the percentage is 18.01.

What he presumably was trying to say is all the arable land is devoted to support of creatures we like, but that's sort of redundant.