(Cw: Meat) Just 12% of people eat 50% of the beef in the US.

Men

50-65

White

ITS NOT EVEN OK TO BE WHITE MAN ANYMORE
- Never was
- 💧 💧
  The only thing he'll be grilling are tears.
A 57 year old white man eating that much red meat surely won't be eating that much for long ☠
- man needs to cook it instead of just abusing their wives into slaving away in the kitchen
so in 20 years when those ppl die of colon cancer is the beef industry going to collapse and thus get propped up by subsidies? beef will be the new milk.
- Always has been. In the states corn and soy subsidies lower the cost of most animal products by half.
Trying to commit suicide gang

I love that emoji. There was also that one tweet of Shapiro or some other loser like him with a huge, unappetizing chunk of meat.
Soy is feminine, but giving yourself colon cancer and ED to own the libs is very manly
- I love all those ghouls doing "manly" things that they, for the most part, very clearly hate doing. Smoking giant cigars, drinking super intense Scotch, eating huge and unappetizing chunks of meat--whatever. It's all very funny because most of the time they're obviously just barely choking whatever it is down while screaming "does this bother you Rachel Maddow?! Are you triggered, college students?!" It's pretty obvious that it bothers them more than it bothers anyone else.
- There's also a lot of hormones in meat, maybe more in red meats idk. There's also lots of added growth hormones and such in dairy and meat to increase production.
  I think there might be argument that carnist weirdos are actually doing some form of hormone therapy accidentally. 🤔
  I've also heard that high meat consumption can potentially increase aggressive behaviors. I'd imagine the hormones are involved in that.
Vice signalling, if you will
- Uh actually they just like that shit and don’t care about anyone’s criticism of their lack of care for the planet etc.
Or they just eat it because it tastes good and they subconsciously are trying to commit socially acceptable suicide through heart attack because they don’t care about living longer but just enjoying sensual pleasures until they croak, regardless of who they hurt in the process. That is how they are trained to be from birth.

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.

Maybe we just need to put these 12% freaks in a gulag and feed them nothing but beans for a few years.
- Movie Idea: “Shawshank Redemption” meets the Campfire scene from “Blazing Saddles.”
  Working Title: The Gulag Fart-I-smell-ago.
Maybe we just need to put these 12% freaks in a gulag and feed them nothing but beans for a few years.

this is the way

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.

Hot take: I think the liberal abhorence of physical violence in schools in self defense of bullies. I don't think there's a good way around it or we should just let it get back to the "good ol' days", but kids who defend themselves often get the book thrown at them. I worked in schools years ago, and most of the time admin would suspend the kid who defended themselves with a wink and a nod to the kid to let them know they actually did the right thing by punching the bully in the nose. I saw a white rich girl get a black eye from the black girl she was being overtly racist to (even calling her the n word), and staff all felt it was justified. But there's a small contingent of administrative staff on school boards that will expedite expelling kids for these situations, which I also saw happen.
Idk, I just feel like if you're hurting people, people can and will kick your ass, and that's actually a valuable lesson.
other americans would swarm me and say, from the script, "it's their money. they have every right to spend it how they want."
It’s almost painful to me how accurately this describes most Americans.
- America is the most heavily propagandized nation in the history of the world.
"I have free choice, so that means every available choice is morally corrrect" is possibly a founding brainworm of American capitalism.

Finally, our very own "Despite making up only 12% of the population..." Stat.

Can't say I'm really surprised. I call America the Burger Reich for a reason.

CW: Nazi shit

Guess the third reich didn't have the paint bucket tool

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

the rough equivalent of more than one hamburger – daily.

WHAT HAVE WE BEEN FUCKING CALLING THESE PEOPLE SINCE BEFORE THIS STUDY BEGAN?!!!

BURGER AMERICANS 🍔 🍔 🍔

BURGER AMERICANS
You repeat yourself.

Haven't eaten meat in what 30 years or something. Don't miss it. Don't even notice it. I think it's a problem of big picture information. If people could understand the destruction associated with the entire industry maybe things would change..

based and vegan pilled
kill me
imo most people wouldn't even notice if you switched the meat in their daily slop with plant material. It's just an attitude thing towards meat.
- I'm slowly navigating life after becoming vegan and this hasn't been true all the time for me but when it is, it fucking hits hard.
  My chili recipe was converted to vegan early on after I came over and you can't fucking tell it's vegan. I've said before on reddit but I will put it up against anyone's "prize winning chili recipe".
  I made sloppy joe's last week with TVP and day one was ok but when it came time for the leftovers, you woundn't have know it was vegan. To me, it was exactly like the slop I grew up with.
  I'm still trying to master tofu. I can't get it at all like my favorite Thai place does it.
  I've been working a bit with the soy curls and "beef slices" you can find from Asian stores and it's been hit and miss with trying to get it right but a few weeks ago I made a mushroom, spinach linguine using the slices and it fucking slapped. I hydrated the slices with veggie broth and some spices and then sauteed them in a pan with my shrooms and spinach and tossed the pasta in at the end and sort of winged it but it was really fucking good.
  Another thing that I think needs to be mentioned is that most meat subs are like half the cost of the animal counterpart. Beyond and manufactured seitan obviously isn't but any of the soy products I've tried are. You also get the same or more protein with the substitutes.
With a lot of people, there's a strong doubling down response when they get shown the climate impact and the animal abuse and the grueling working conditions of the meat industry. Everybody knows killing animals is wrong, most people find cruelty towards animals absolutely abhorrent, but carnists are extremely effective at coping with the cognitive dissonance. idk what to do about this myself tbh, i'm just saying that lack of information may not be the main problem here.
- After hearing JT double down on "Vegans mean" in the most recent Deprogram in reference to the AMA here, I thought more about it.
  It feels like vestigial liberalism when being confronted with a position further left than them. Using underserved communities and other typical progressive jargon to explain why actually their position is more better for those suffering under capitalism. Then they move to personal attacks or character assassination of the people holding the objectively better position instead of engaging with the content of the argument.
  Finishing it up with ohh I'm just so picky was the cherry on top. Sorry you'll have to develop your culinary horizons to stop supporting the unethical treatment and murder of our animal comrades. This is coming from someone raised in a very similar household where pepper was considered spicy and with friends and family that would literally only eat cheeseburgers (no vegetables, just meat and cheese) pizza, tendies, and peanut butter sandwiches. If I can grow from it, so can anyone who actually wants to and spends time finding ways to enjoy new things and replace meat
I still eat meat and every time I do, I think it taates like shit compared to the non murdery parts of the meal.

bro their stomachs must be fucked

“disproportionate beef eaters”, defined as those who... eat more than four ounces – the rough equivalent of more than one hamburger – daily.
- Feel like most people eating meat are usually eating chicken anyway

Goddamn, at this point I'm starting to wonder what problems even fucking are normally distributed in some sense. It's the same as guns and car pollution, fuck. Beef is expensive as hell these days anyway.

at this point I'm starting to wonder what problems even fucking are normally distributed in some sense
Well, things that are somewhat equally distributed. Can't have a normal distribution in a society where things are distributed unequally. (wanted to do the rollsafe meme here but couldn't find it)

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

https://online.ucpress.edu/elementa/article/doi/10.12952/journal.elementa.000116/112904/Carrying-capacity-of-U-S-agricultural-land-Ten

Basically, a sustainable omnivore diet would have less meat, a lot less beef, and more varied sources of meat (possum, raccoon, etc)

Medieval animal use patterns are way greener than what we have now. Pigs acted as garbage disposals, then by day a professional swineherd would take everyone's pigs out to the forest. Cows and sheep ate grass off useless rocky land, and were walked to where they'd be slaughtered.
But I don't really think this is a deep argument for how things should be today. How can you restructure cities so pigs can commute between homes and the forest? How can cows walk all the way to pasture and back to the city for slaughter? I don't think it's actually possible; the density of modern cities breaks these models. But that same density is ecologically required a thousand other ways.
- if you force rich people to use their stashed-away wealth to fund this stuff then it's a non-issue
  everyone in NYC already eats pork, they can eat pork the same way they do now. Animal agriculture only accounts for 6% of emissions total (even when you include these dumb unhealthy beef-guzzling white males) while transportation is 30%
if that's even true it could only be relevant in a world where there's not enough agricultural land to support growing plants fit for human consumption, which is not the world we live in
- With enough time and research we could meet everyone’s caloric needs with vat grown algae taking up the land area the size of Los Angeles.

what the fuck

I'm just assuming it's the "You don't eat meat? I'm going to eat three hamburgers to make up for it." people.
- Those people are loud and annoying but I doubt they make up an eighth of the United States
- it's the people who grew up with the "Beef. It's what's for dinner!" commercials
- It’s not.
- I think those people don't exist outside your little rage circle
Jordan Peterson fans?

the beef people walk among us

Beef isn't even that good, to be honest. I've also heard that beef is one of the most energy-demanding meats to produce.

When I still ate meat, I thought beef was pretty the only kind that didn't taste horrible.
- a lot of that is the feed they feed it. gamey steak is a very different taste, almost musky, you can kinda taste the grass in it too
- Huh, that's honestly really surprising to hear. Beef has one of the strongest smells and tastes, I always thought that would be the meat that people that don't really like meat would hate.
It really isn't. I only like burgers because you get to season the meat properly and fill the buns with sauce and salad.
Steaks are also an incredibly mid food to me, they're chewy and don't taste like much at all, I'm pretty sure people that supposedly love steak are just virtue signalling.
Beef stews can be pretty good tho, but that's only because of the veggies, spices and savoriness of the meat, which you could get from other stuff too anyway.
- I’m not advocating for meat eating at all when I say this:
  Steaks aren’t supposed to be chewy. It means you either got a trash cut or it was cooked wrong.
- I fucking love steak. Not virtue signaling.
  I also know it is bad for my health and the planet so i don’t eat it that often.
I like beef Gansu style but steaks are extremely overrated. And also usually prefer pork more

C A R N I S M

to expand, meat eating on a regular basis is an extremely recent thing
it is in no way "the natural order of things"
only rich people would eat meat more than ~ once per month at best
- i mean, people would eat eggs and milk all the time. same with fish. idk what culture youre referring to here, even inland places in europe had people fishing all the time. like 10 hens can produce so many eggs you dont know what to do with them. and a decently large flock of sheep has enough of them dropping dead naturally that you can eat sheep for a whole month (people really underestimate how much meat is on a whole ass sheep or cow, that can last one family a loooong time).
  in fact populations in europe that didnt eat fish regularly would thin out and die off because vitamin d was in a very short supply during the little ice age and the actual ice age (around the time light skin developed 20-50k years ago, this was a very strong selection pressure). without proper levels of vitamin d you end up being unable to carry babies.
- but it's still very telling that when you give people enough money land and wealth, many of them start eating more meat, while very few of them start eating less. Chinese people rocketed their meat consumption over the last 30 years, and I really don't think anyone was propagandizing them to do so
  obviously not the obscene American pounds of meat a day, but maybe 4 oz of total animal flesh per day would be a reasonable standard.
  There's also a very telling trend in India where all the vegetarian states just happen to consume more dairy and have a high rate of lactase persistence compared to the meat/fish eating states
- eating meat in itself is natural, although on a regular basis is quite new and should be taken away
Little dark age: Western beef consumption

Wtf who are these people how do you even eat that much beef, snack on jerky, eat steak for breakfast?

I assume this is the bottom 12% of income, who can't afford not to eat meat.

When you're definitely in touch with the global poor and not just an asshole trying to dunk on vegans mindlessly
I dunno what it's like where you live but ground beef is at least 5x more expensive than black beans here
- I know, it's an
  joke.
the bit was too subtle, but we'll get em next time
- The problem is there are tons of carnists on here who say that shit all the time. The only way we can understand subtle jokes like this is if we get rid of the reactionaries that we're mocking
love it. I love my Vegan comrades. Never stop dunking on us carnists.

I just want shrimp

Get rid of all the rest for all I care and give me sustainably farmed shrimp I'll pay whatever

I could mo a or less go vegetarian if forced, but kim chi just tastes slightly better with salt shrimp.
A sustainable pescatarian diet can have up to 50% less emissions than a regular omnivore diet! Muscles/clams and other bivalves actually improve the waters they're farmed in too, and if there was such a thing as a meat plant it would have to be bivalves so ethical considerations are pretty much a moot point.

is not OK

The 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

Not to be that guy, but each chicken produces 4 wings.
- How so? They have 2 wings each?

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".

I recommend you check the paper and not just go by the usual shit science reporting from MSM, the authors address this issue
One limitation of this work is that it was based on 1-day diet recalls, so our results do not represent usual intake. Averaging both days of data available on the NHANES would not address this problem, would reduce our sample size by 15%, and would mix recall methods between an in-person interview (day 1) and one done on the phone (day 2). Still, as a check, we examined day 2 and found the same associations with gender and MyPlate guidance. Other associations were similar in magnitude, though not always significant. Another potential limitation is that the NHANES is a US study, and the data we analyzed are from 2015–2018. Thus, these results may not be generalizable or useful for targeting interventions in other populations, and do not capture any changes that have occurred in the correlates of beef consumption since the COVID-19 pandemic. At this point in time, however, post-pandemic NHANES dietary data are not available.
- You say "address" as if they were able to appropriately fix the issue, rather than addressing it as a limitation of the study. Limitations are fine, I'm just trying to explain the big one here in an easier to understand way because the reporting makes it seem like it's a consistent 12% eating a shit ton of beef.
any given day,
I quit drinking almost every day of the week, I almost quit on Monday, I almost quit on Tuesday...

It's the keto dads.

Yo this is gross af

Almond milk and never look back. I've been almond milk exclusive for almost a decade and now I can't stomach the smell of dairy milk.
- Try oat milk!

My dad-in-law ate casseroles and steak for half a century until his heart almost exploded.

Now he only eats cobb salads and monte cristos

Weird i never heard of a monte cristo sandwich before. Your dad in law must be ancient.
- Monte Cristo sandwich is the goddamned bee's knees

if we put these people to a vegan diet and everyone else cut out their meat by a good 50% we can probably fix a lot of issues from ecology to diet, then we can move on to pressing matters

Would production follow consumption patterns? The meat industry is so highly subsidized as it is, I can see the government pumping even more money into it for purely ideological reasons
- we would gradually scale down the meat industry yes

IMO, those people eat about 4 times the average amount

I mean based on the statistics presented in this thread, that's not merely your opinion, it's the facts.

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.