By Dan Murphy
The year was 1971.
President Nixon (and Vice President Spiro Agnew) had yet to descend
into scandal. In fact, Nixon was widely lauded for encouraging “ping
pong diplomacy,” as the U.S. table tennis team became the first American
athletes to visit Mao’s Red China.
The World Series ended in a thrilling seven-game victory by the
Pittsburgh Pirates, whose star outfielder Roberto Clemente and Series
MVP would be killed in a plane crash just months later.
In entertainment, despite competition from such classics as A
Clockwork Orange, The French Connection and Fiddler on the Roof, the
coveted Best Picture Oscar went to Patton, in which George C. Scott set
the standard for true-to-life portrayals of historical figures. And the
Grammys were swept by Simon and Garfunkel and their iconic song, Bridge
Over Troubled Waters.
Although that was 40 years ago, it sometimes doesn’t seem so long ago
or all that different from contemporary America. But there were
substantial differences between then and now. The U.S. population then
was only 207 million, and as I like to remind my teen-aged son, there
was no Internet, no cable TV, no CDs, no iPods, no iPhones, no digital
cameras, no cellphone videos.
Heck, there were no VCRs and those bulky video cassettes, much less DVDs or streaming video.
There was one other distinct difference: 1971 was by most analyses
the peak year for domestic consumption of red meat. In 1971, per capita
beef consumption was 83.9 pounds; pork consumption was 60.6 pounds; and
“other” red meat (lamb and veal, primarily) was 5.1 pounds.
By comparison, 40 years later the comparable figures in 2011 were
beef, 57 pounds per capita; pork, 45.1 pounds; and other red meat was
only 1.2 pounds per person.
That means that total red meat consumption has declined by nearly
one-third in just four decades. For many industries, losing a third of
total market share would be catastrophic.
Of course, it’s no mystery what has happened since 1971.
Thanks to a concerted campaign by dietary and medical experts to
dissuade people from consuming too much “fat,” millions of Americans
switched to poultry (ie, chicken), while avoiding so-called “unhealthy”
beef and pork.
It didn’t matter that much of that chicken consumption was in the form
of nuggets, breaded patties and fried chicken, hardly a lower calorie,
lower fat alternative. White was right, and red meat was dead meat.
But enough of a trudge through history. Now, in 2016, there is good news in the meat sector.
According to data compiled by Rabobank, the financial giant many
consider one of the world’s most authoritative predictors of economic
trends in agribusiness and commodity markets, per-capita meat
consumption in the United States appears to be increasing at the fastest
rate since that vaunted year of 1971.
Americans now consume about 193 pounds of beef, pork and chicken per
person per year, which represents an increase of 5% versus an average of
184 pounds per capita just four years earlier. And according to William
Sawyer, Rabobank director of food and agricultural research, total
per-capita meat consumption will reach record levels of more than 200
pounds/year by 2018.
Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.
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