In recent decades, average Americans have steadily increased their consumption of meat, milk, and eggs dramatically 224 pounds of red meat and poultry, 280 eggs, 20.5 pounds of fishAnd 667 pounds of dairy per year — among the highest rates in the world. The dominance of animal products on Americans’ plates has had dire consequences for animals, almost all of which are factory-farmed, and has also accelerated climate change and the pollution of America’s waterways.
But these numbers are just population-wide averages—they don’t tell us much about the range of dietary habits among the 335 million Americans, and how many people cut out meat and other animal products entirely.
Understanding rates of vegetarianism and veganism, in particular, is tricky because people are not always reliable narrators of their own diets. Somewhere in the middle 2 from 6 percent Americans surveyed say they are vegetarians, but many of these same people report that they are Eating meat recently.
This story first appeared in the Processing Meat Newsletter
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Surveys on vegetarianism and meat eating are “notoriously unreliable” Jack Freitas-GroffAn economist at the University of Texas at Austin told me.
In an effort to understand what people are actually eating, Freitas-Groff and two fellow economists — Trevor Woolley Carl Meyer at the University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University — reviewed people’s grocery receipts. The team analyzed the grocery purchases of hundreds of thousands of households from 2005 to 2020 to see how Americans’ meat consumption has changed over time. They were searching Published in June As a working paper — not yet peer-reviewed, so the results should be viewed as experimental — by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.
Their results represent a growing gap in American meat consumption: The number of households avoiding meat increased slightly, while all other households increased their meat purchases by an average of about 15 percent by weight compared to other foods. Overall grocery sales declined during this period, as Americans ate more of their meals outside the home, but as a grocery segment, meat purchases increased significantly.
From 2005 to 2020, the share of households that bought no meat at the grocery store rose from 4.1 to 4.6 percent — a 12 percent jump. The share of households buying any animal product – meat, milk or eggs – doubled, from a tiny 0.5 percent to a still-tiny 1 percent.
“The growth of meat abstainers is promising, but over 15 years, the growth appears to be very modest,” Joshua TasofAn economics professor at Claremont Graduate University who was not involved in the study told Vox in an email.
The authors are hesitant to make sweeping generalizations about the state of American meat consumption based on these findings. The study looked only at food purchased at grocery stores, they noted, which accounts for approx Two-thirds of caloric intakeAnother third is eaten at restaurants and schools, which were not included in the study. The data also excludes meat sold at grocery store deli counters, which includes both raw meat and prepared deli meat.
But the paper provides a more granular view of consumers’ relationship with meat than we’ve had before, dovetailing with other recent research findings, such as a 2023 study showing that 12 percent Americans — mostly men and older people — eat 50 percent of the nation’s beef.
Tasof called the study an “impressive paper” that uses the best available data for consumer analysis.
The study period, from 2005 to 2020, coincides with the growth of news coverage of farm animal welfare—a period in which numerous animal rights groups grew from small grassroots organizations to well-oiled machines; Undercover investigations into factory farms drew national attention; About a dozen states have passed farm animal welfare laws; Such as cultural icons Beyonce And Billie Eilish promoted the benefits of plant-based eating; And plant-based meat and milk, made by companies like Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods and Oatly, have gone mainstream.
But could increased media attention on factory farming — fueled by increased animal rights activism — and better vegetarian products explain the shift away from meat among a small but growing segment of American households? That may be part of it, the researchers concluded, but most of the change, they found, could be attributed to other factors, including rising meat prices.
Excavating data on America’s transgenic meat consumption
About two-thirds of the increase in meat avoidance, the researchers estimate, is due to higher meat prices and people buying less food at the grocery store and more at restaurants and elsewhere.
The remaining third? Some of this is due to the death of older generations and younger people becoming heads of households. According to the paper, households where a head was born after 1980 were 50 percent more likely to avoid meat and almost twice as likely to buy animal products than other households.
In 2004, these households made up only 1 percent of the sample; By 2020, they account for 15 percent. If this trend holds, it could lead to a steady increase in households abstaining from meat in the coming decades, representing a bright spot in the paper’s otherwise discouraging findings. (young generation Also inclined Report high rates (of vegetarianism, flexitarianism, pasterianism and veganism in the survey.)
Differences between age groups are even more pronounced when looking at rates of avoidance of all animal products. About 2.5 percent of households whose heads were born after 1990 did not purchase any animal products; For other age groups, the share is closer to 0.5 to 1 percent.
While the study didn’t attempt to explain why younger people are avoiding animal products at such high rates, it’s not unreasonable to think that animal endorsements — often directed at the younger generation — can change social behavior. That said, younger consumers have less money, so they may be more sensitive to rising meat prices, and they Eating away from home is more likely.
The researchers also looked at whether increased media coverage of factory farming contributed to meat avoidance.
It “depends on the model we use,” Woolley wrote in an email. “Taken together, it appears that media coverage likely played a role, but the magnitude of the effect is difficult to determine given that it is consistently not statistically significant (unlike the effects of price and total grocery purchase volume). It does appear to have some explanatory power, however.”
A 2011 study found that from 1991 to 2008, demand for pork and poultry decreased as a result of media coverage of cruelty on pig and poultry farms. 2.6 percent and 5 percentrespectively.
As for the role of plant-based meat alternatives, although they’ve generated a lot of buzz in the media and pop culture and the sector’s sales have grown significantly in recent years, it’s still a much smaller market to explain why more families are moving away from meat. The study found that plant-based meat products had no clear displacement effect on animal meat sales. However, some popular brands, such as Beyond Meat and Impossible, did not become widely available in grocery stores until the last year of the paper’s data.
Plant-based milks such as oat and soy, however, displace cow’s milk on an almost 1-to-1 basis.
The price of meat is not right
The overall picture painted by the study is dire for factory-farmed animals and our warming planet. A small number of households have begun to avoid meat at the grocery store in recent decades, but they are outnumbered by all other households, which seem to be buying more meat.
The findings illustrate how critical the price of meat is to consumer behavior—a reality that is painfully obvious to economists but often neglected in advocacy focused on animal cruelty. Changing people’s hearts and minds can only go so far; Changing the sticker prices that consumers see in grocery stores will likely have a greater impact.
Although food prices have risen over the past two decades, meat and other animal products are relatively cheap. This is not because raising and slaughtering animals is a cheap endeavor, but because livestock companies have been completely deregulated, thereby spreading their costs throughout society.
Farmed animals pay the price with their suffering, as do wild animals in the form of massive deforestation and polluted rivers. Many farmers take on mountains of debt to pay the costs, while the slaughterhouse workers pay the costs Loss of fingers and limbs. Ultimately, we all pay for it in the form of climate change and increasingly ineffective antibiotics.
If livestock producers were to internalize these costs – and if we could just move a lot away subsidy Doled out for the industry – meat prices will be much higher, causing some consumers to reduce or eliminate their meat purchases.
According to True Price, a Dutch non-profit organization that estimates the environmental cost of food, only internalizing environmental damage (excluding costs such as animal cruelty and public health) will increase the price of some animal products. Two- and five-fold:
- Beef increased from $5.34 to $27.36 per pound
- Cheese increased from $3.74 to $7.50 per pound
- Chicken increased from $2.20 to $4.03 per pound
Advocating for raising the price of meat, especially after an election where inflation and rising grocery bills played a big role in ousting the incumbent party, feels – to put it mildly – insensitive and politically risky. But at the same time, consumers enjoy lower meat prices at a steep cost to society, while polluting meat companies. Celebrating record profits. Some governments are rethinking this long-standing deregulation paradigm.
Just this week the Danish government passed a moderate on livestock emissions, and it is also investing in programs to produce plant-based foods, which are far more environmentally friendly than meat, more cost-effective. If we’re serious about making the Earth livable for future generations and ameliorating one of humanity’s greatest moral crimes, the rest of us need to follow their lead.
