A demand for the average American to eat more meat would have to explain, as a baseline, why our already positive trend in meat consumption isn't yielding positive outcomes. There are potential explanations (you could argue increased processing offsets the purported benefits, for example), but those are left unstated by the website.
[1]: https://www.agweb.com/opinion/drivers-u-s-capita-meat-consum...
[2]: https://ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/chart-detai...
That number seemed unreal to me, so I looked it up. I think it represents the total pre-processing weight, not the actual meat meat consumption. From Wikipedia:
> As an example of the difference, for 2002, when the FAO figure for US per capita meat consumption was 124.48 kg (274 lb 7 oz), the USDA estimate of US per capita loss-adjusted meat consumption was 62.6 kg (138 lb)
Processing, cutting into sellable pieces, drying, and spoilage/loss mean the amount of meat consumed is about half of that number.
> The US is the biggest consumer of beef in the world, but, according to new research, it’s actually a small percentage of people who are doing most of the eating. A recent study shows that on any given day, just 12% of people in the US account for half of all beef consumed in the US.
> Men and people between the ages of 50 and 65 were more likely to be in what the researchers dubbed as “disproportionate beef eaters”, defined as those who, based on a recommended daily 2,200 calorie-diet, eat more than four ounces – the rough equivalent of more than one hamburger – daily. The study analyzed one-day dietary snapshots from over 10,000 US adults over a four-year period. White people were among those more likely to eat more beef, compared with other racial and ethnic groups like Black and Asian Americans. Older adults, college graduates, and those who looked up MyPlate, the US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) online nutritional educational campaign, were far less likely to consume a disproportionate amount of beef.
High steaks society: who are the 12% of people consuming half of all beef in the US? - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/20/beef-usd... - October 20th, 2023
Demographic and Socioeconomic Correlates of Disproportionate Beef Consumption among US Adults in an Age of Global Warming - https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/15/17/3795 | https://doi.org/10.3390/nu15173795 - August 2023
(my observation of this is that we can sunset quite a bit of US beef production and still be fine from a food supply and security perspective, as consumption greatly exceeds healthy consumption limits in the aggregate)
This phrasing strongly suggests it’s not the same 12% every day. In which case… it’s probably not that noteworthy.
They also found a demographic correlation, which isn't easily explained by random sampling.
Thats not the implication of 12% of Americans eating 50% of beef by consumed by all Americans that day.
If I had to make up some numbers it’s probably that, on any random day, 12% of Americans ate 50% of the beef (a large burger), 28% of American ate the rest of the beef (bit of lunch meat), and 60% of Americans did not eat any beef.