Americans are eating less and less meat
Meat eating in the United States is going out of style. According to a Department of Agriculture report, Americans are projected to eat 12.2 percent less meat in 2012 than they did 2007. And it’s not just the weak economy. As Mark Bittman observes, there’s a real long-term trend here: “Beef consumption has been in decline for about 20 years; the drop in chicken is even more dramatic, over the last five years or so; pork also has been steadily slipping for about five years.”
Why is this happening? The Daily Livestock Report blames rising meat prices in the United States. As countries like China and India get richer, they’re eating more meat, which is helping to drive up U.S. exports and making beef, pork, and chicken more expensive here at home. Ethanol also plays a role: Nowadays, American farmers divert bushels and bushels of corn to make fuel, which drives up feed prices and, again, makes meat pricier.
Perhaps just as significantly, though, it does seem that attitudes toward meat are changing. More and more people appear to be cutting back on beef and pork consumption for environmental or ethical reasons. (Although before vegetarians get too excited, one factor that often gets overlooked here is the aging of the population — as the baby boomers get older, they’ve been eating less meat.)
The Daily Livestock Report, for its part, blames government policy for waging a 40-year information campaign to dissuade people from eating meat. Bittman, on the other hand, finds that notion preposterous — he notes, among other things, that government agencies still shy away from recommending to people that they eat less meat. Read his post for a fuller dissection. The drop in meat-eating has come in spite of heavy government policies, which include heavy subsidies, not because of it.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/americans-are-eating-less-and-less-meat/2012/01/11/gIQANUvmqP_blog.html
I wish it was for strictly ethical and healthy reasons.
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It's the lousy quality of the meat, the things they do to it make it look fresh, like pumping CO into it and the collapse of inspection by turning it over to the corporations.
It's the pollution in the groundwater by these operations, the danger of BHG, anti-biotics and mad cow disease, and the fact that the conumption of meat causes inflammation of the body no matter how the animals were treated.
Inflammation is a cause of human misery. Many say it's largely due to these proteins that rot in the gut. The rush or energy that people get addicted to eating meat is from their body running full tilt trying to eliminate the foul fermenting matter. They get tired and remember that so they go back and get some more. Like sugar, like coffee, like... whatever.
Of course there is the freak out factor of what the whole thing is, when you get right down to it. But people are harrassed for not eating meat, by many sources. Just like they are bugged about a lot of things. They're afraid if the leave the SAD they'll get some form of malnutrition. When they feel sick, it's really detoxing. It has to be done carefully, not radically.
Many people I know are regarding this in a different way. I'll make a separate post here about it.
