(Cw: Meat) Just 12% of people eat 50% of the beef in the US.
(Cw: Meat) Just 12% of people eat 50% of the beef in the US.
Beef production is a huge climate crisis driver, and a new study says only a small percentage of the country does most of the eating
That is wild. I've cut back on meat consumption to only once or twice a week and advocate to people who want to try vegetarian/veganism but struggle with it to just approach it gradually rather than all or nothing. I make the argument that if we all reduced our consumption by 50-80% that would go a lot further than only a few people reducing their consumption 100%.
Now I'm not so sure. Maybe we just need to put these 12% freaks in a gulag and feed them nothing but beans for a few years.
i had not thought about it, but this does not surprise me. the ideology of the US is to make the wealthiest asshole in a room of 10 people feel completely free to ruin everyone else's experience/lives.
i remember when i was much younger and first recognizing the environmental destruction of overconsumption and the shittiness of rich people stunting on poor people, and not for anything so noble as "feeding kids". rather, "i'm gonna buy a hummer and drive across country" or "i'm buying a fashion accessory for $2500." i would impulsively say, "that's stupid. you're an asshole" to those people.
and, right on cue, other americans would swarm me and say, from the script, "it's their money. they have every right to spend it how they want." for 9 out of 10 of us in the US, that thinking is still dumb, but probably not undermining community or the biosphere. but there's the 1 asshole that sees their personal power in the moment as an invitation to wreck the place. to piss all over the sink in a restaurant. to break the public phone or steal the phonebook. to take all the candy in the bowl. to not wash their hands after a shit.
there's one person in a room of 10 that needs a constant reminder that their actions have consequences and if they are an asshole, the other 9 are within their power to smack some sense into them.
This is actually a statistical error. Beef Georg, who lives in a cave in Colorado and eats 60,000 cows a day, is an outlier and should not be counted
American diets are obscene, but in terms of carrying capacity and ecology, a mildly omnivore diet still feeds more people than a vegan diet, due to the presence of land that is unsuitable for cultivation, in-between periods of dry/cold weather where crops struggle to grow, etc
Also consider the pests that cropland attracts, which under a holistic pre-colonial agriculture mode (which produces more calories per acre at the expense of more human labor required), would have often been dealt with through killing (and eating)
https://i.postimg.cc/Hs3NchBJ/y54eh6t6f.png
Basically, a sustainable omnivore diet would have less meat, a lot less beef, and more varied sources of meat (possum, raccoon, etc)
Wtf who are these people how do you even eat that much beef, snack on jerky, eat steak for breakfast?
is not OKThe stat that horrifies me is how a person can consume multiple lives in one sitting. Like every two chicken wings equals one life slaughtered, and people get orders of 8 pieces at once, maybe multiple times a day or for multiple people.
I guess cows, pigs, horses, whatever are bigger animals and feed more people, but it's still messed up to me to know that one small meat snack requires the slaughter of an entire animal. It's not like we can amputate their legs and only eat that part.
I think I'd still feel the same knowing the cost of lives of other products. Like how many lives had to be lost to mine the cobalt in each of my electronic devices
A lot of this reporting is a big misunderstanding of statistics.
As the study says
About 45% of the population had zero beef consumption on any given day, whereas the 12% of disproportionate beef consumers accounted for 50% of the total beef consumed
Now just as a thought experiment, do you think that almost half of the US never eats any beef? No, of course not. But on any given day? Sure, quite possible. People's diets vary.
A randomly selected person might have a McDonald's hamburger for lunch and a steak for dinner and be part of the 12% on the first day but then eat mushroom ravioli for lunch and pizza for dinner on the second day and be part of the 45%.
And there might be certain demographics that are more likely to make up that 12% on a given day but that doesn't mean there's a particular nonchanging group of high consumers.
I'm not going to dig into the study here but just as an example, let's say Dog Breed X is 1.5 times more likely to bark than Dog Breed Y is. You can't hear a dog bark and say "Ah it must be Breed X then!", you can only say "Ah, it's more likely from Breed X than Breed Y".
It's the keto dads.
Yo this is gross af
If I'm reading it correctly, the abstract says they looked at participants' self reported 24 hour diet, and pegged the beef intake to calories eaten. Does anyone know where one might find data on diets reported over say, a month?
I wouldn’t miss animal products if they all vanished tomorrow.
A lot of this reporting is a big misunderstanding of statistics.
As the study says
About 45% of the population had zero beef consumption on any given day, whereas the 12% of disproportionate beef consumers accounted for 50% of the total beef consumed
Now just as a thought experiment, do you think that almost half of the US never eats any beef? No, of course not. But on any given day? Sure, quite possible. People's diets vary.
A randomly selected person might have a McDonald's hamburger for lunch and a steak for dinner and be part of the 12% on the first day but then eat mushroom ravioli for lunch and pizza for dinner on the second day and be part of the 45%.
And there might be certain demographics that are more likely to make up that 12% on a given day but that doesn't mean there's a particular nonchanging group of high consumers.
