American Animal Consumption Trends
Print This Post
The New York Times created an interesting graph that depicts the trends of animal consumption in the United States over the last 100 years.
Click on the image to see a larger version at the NYT website.
As you can see, there are dramatic increases in the consumption of particular animals directly due to the establishment of certain fast food restaurants. Beef is tied to McDonald’s and chicken is tied to KFC.
Another interesting piece of information highlighted in the graph is how little lamb and how little veal Americans eat. I think that’s probably due to a distaste of eating baby animals. Sadly, what most people don’t know is that the beef and chicken they consume also often comes from young animals. Beef cattle are normally is slaughtered between 9 and 30 months of age. The average lifespan for a cow or bull is about 7 years. Chickens are sometimes slaughtered as young as three weeks of age. By 14 weeks of age, nearly all chickens (caged as well as “free-range”) are slaughtered. Naturally, they’d live much longer, up to 15 years.
Another tidbit from the graphic: Americans eat nearly 150 percent more meat than they did in 1910. This is likely largely due to the establishment of factory farming., which supplies fast food restaurants as well as most grocery stores and other restaurants.
And although overall consumption has increased, I believe that the decrease in consumption of beef since about the 80s is likely correlated to an increased interest in animal rights and human health.
When you look at this graphic, what do you see?
When you look at this graphic, what do you see?
I see that wars spike meat consumption. Armies move on meat – The more (violent) soldiers you have the more mouths to feed. And then of course we have to “rebuild” those countries… Everything’s in place to move the animals through our war-food-chain.
this was very sobering. interesting that the launch of “where’s the beef” campaign didn’t spike sales. wonder what the $15 million new pig flesh campaign will do to sales. it’s all trauma causing and what bee wrote above was so poignant.
oops, apologies BEA, i spelled your name wrong.
Good post, just fyi – cows can live to be 20-25 years. The average may be 7, but that has got to be because they are usually killed before they reach the end of their natural lifespans. http://www.farmsanctuarykidzclub.com/Learn/learn_cowfacts.html
The relationship you noticed to wars, Bea, is interesting. I hadn’t noticed that before.
I think the decline in beef consumption is a big-time positive. I think it’s not just health-conscious consumers, I think it’s a trend of people widening their circle of community. I think people naturally think of mammals as similar to humans and therefor it’s unnatural to eat them.
The increase in chicken consumption is, I hope, temporary. I think it’s related to the decrease in beef consumption, but I think it’s going to change in the future and have a downward slope just like beef consumption. During that time, there may be a slight spike in egg and milk consumption. Hopefully that trend will be very short-lived and eventually very few animals will be tortured, killed, and eaten.