I find this statistics interesting… and disturbing too.
It’s about meat consumption of the homo sapiens.
The data, gathered by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and analyzed by The Economist, indicates that we eat more meat now compared to the last 50 years. From 70m tons to 268m tons in 2007.
Let’s take a look at the kings of carnivores of the world as well as countries who consume the least meat.
Meat consumption per kg per person, 2007.
Top 5 meat eaters:
- Luxembourg – 136.5 kg
- United States – 125.4
- Australia – 121.2
- New Zealand – 115.7
- Spain – 110.2
Bottom 5:
- Rwanda – 5.5
- Burundi – 5.1
- Democratic Republic of the Congo – 4.7
- Bangladesh – 4.0
- India – 3.2
(What about Malaysia? It’s ranked 77 with 48.1 kg meat consumption a year.)
To get an idea how much meat we eat, I did a quick search and found that Big Mac weighs 90 g (or 3.2 oz for 2 patties). That means Americans eat approximately 3.85 Big Mac a day or 115 a month.
(If you take the normal hamburgers, double the numbers.)
That’s a lot of meat, I must say.
Anyway there’s more about the stats.
Even the tastes have changed. In 1960s, cow (beef and veal) was the most favored meat – accounting 40% of meat consumption. But now pork is the meat of choice.
It’s disturbing to see many of us have become Tyrannosaurus rex more than anything else.
The question is are we designed to eat so much meat?
I personally don’t think so. That was what drove me to change our family diet more than a year ago – for health reasons.
And we never look back.
As with changing other habits, it’s not easy for us to adapt to the new diet but we managed to pull it through.
To learn more about our changed and improved family diet, gallop to:
http://www.parentwonder.com/nonconformists-guide/
I am glad it has nothing to do with this FAO-compiled stats. Or becoming T. rex like everyone does.
