How Much Meat Do Americans Eat?

Sylvia Powell
2 min readOct 26, 2021

When people from other countries think of Americans, they think of meat, such as a big juicy steak or one of those comically large turkey legs that can be found at DisneyWorld. We’re known for eating a lot of meat, but do we really eat that much more meat than other countries?

Thanks to this handy worldwide meat consumption chart created by How To Cook, I can confidently say that NO! Americans do NOT eat the most meat! IN fact, we don’t even make it into the top 3 for the largest meat consumption per person.

The 10 Countries That Consume The Most Meat Per Capita Per Year

  1. Hong Kong : 189.48 kg
  2. Iceland: 183.09
  3. Macao: 164.43
  4. Portugal: 151.70
  5. USA: 145.22
  6. Spain: 141.22
  7. Samoa: 141.11
  8. Australia: 139.40
  9. French Polynesia: 138.35
  10. Antigua & Barbuda: 128.92

As you can see, the United States falls right in the middle of the list so there are four other countries that were found to have a higher meat consumption per capita. The United States meat consumption ame to 145.22 kg per person every year, roughly 20% less than that of Hong Kong which has the highest meat consumption at 189.48 kg per person per year.

If you’re interested in knowing just how much of each type of meat Americans like to eat, you’re in luck as the handy meat chart also contains that information as well! The types of meat are broken down into beef, mutton and goat, pork, poultry, fish and seafood, and “other meat” which includes things like rabbit or camel. Americans were found to prefer poultry over all the other types of meat, and they least prefer the goat and mutton. You can find the breakdown of consumption of each type of meat per American per year below.

Meat Consumption by Americans (per capita per year)

Beef: 37.16 kg

Mutton & Goat: 0.54 kg

Pork: 27.99 kg

Poultry: 56.64 kg

Fish and seafood: 22.22 kg

Other meat: 0.81 kg

Total meat supply: 145.36 kg

What is your favorite type of meat to eat, and do your preferences match your country’s?

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