Food Justice: America’s Romance with Meat

[Farmer Leslie]

Hi, Folks, I just added a new post to my Food Justice blog. It's the story of America's Romance with Meat.

Did you know American’s eat more meat than any other country in the world except Luxembourg? Why is that? Is it because we’re blessed with abundance or is something else going on?

The American Heart Association (AHA) recommends we eat three to six ounces of meat or fish a day. That averages out to 106 pounds a year. Americans eat all most twice that much meat. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Americans ate an average of 190 pounds of meat per person in 2012.

But we didn’t always eat this much meat. In 1910, Americans ate an average of 109 pounds of meat a year, very close to the AHA recommendation—a little over 10 pounds of poultry, 43 pounds of beef, about the same amount of pork, about ten pounds of fish and a few pounds of veal and lamb. America’s meat eating habits stayed pretty much the same through the mid 1940s.
But after World War II, our meat consumption spiked dramatically. By 1959 we were eating 10 more pounds of beef and ten more pounds of poultry a year. The late 1940s saw the advent of feed lots with cattle crammed shoulder to shoulder in large paddocks and chickens crammed wing to wing...If I've sparked your interest, read more at http://www.leslielytle.net/#!blog/c7bm

 

[IceAngel]

Did you know American’s eat more meat than any other country in the world except Luxembourg? Why is that? Is it because we’re blessed with abundance or is something else going on?

I would imagine our Inuit Nation eats primarily meat. I remember reading that even though they have lots of melanin in their skin, they don't suffer from diseases such as Rickets because they consume such large quantities of fat and organ meats.

 

[Farmer Leslie]

That certainly makes sense! Rickets is caused by Vitamin D deficiency and liver and fatty fish are two of the top sources of Vitamin D.