American carnivores

After decades of increase, global meat consumption fell in 2019. In polling around the world, people showed growing concerns about raising and killing animals for human consumption—concerns about animal welfare but also human health and the fact that meat consumption is a major driver of global warming. In the U.K., the number of self-described vegans quadrupled between 2014 and 2019, to 600,000.

On some measures, the U.S. has the world’s highest meat consumption per capita—but in 2019, it started falling there, too. By 2022, Americans were eating 10 pounds less meat a year per person—down to 264 pounds—than they were in 2020.

And then last year, all that changed, as U.S. meat sales hit a record US$104.6 billion, and the average American ate almost 7 percent more meat than in 2019.

What happened?

Glynn Tonsor is a professor of agricultural economics at Kansas State University and oversees the U.S. Meat Demand Monitor. Tonsor says the phenomenon isn’t entirely understood, but several factors appear to be in play: There are pharmaceutical trends, with the introduction of new weight-loss drugs, like Ozempic and Wegovy, that some 40 million Americans are now using. And there are clear demographic trends, with a growing, disproportionately meat-eating Hispanic population in America, and—most significantly—a rising appetite for meat among younger generations.

Generation Z and Millennials tend to eat more of it than their Gen X and Boomer elders ever have. There are also clearly stated reasons, as Meat Demand Monitor surveys are ascertaining, why younger Americans are choosing to eat meat. What’s mysterious, Tonsor says, is why those reasons seem to matter more in the U.S. than they do elsewhere—as young Americans’ generational peers in Europe and the U.K. continue to consume less meat year after year, making the U.S. a bigger and bigger outlier …

Allison Braden: What do we know about who’s eating more meat in America?