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The early 1970s were the real heyday of beef in the US. It was the era of stroganoff, stews, and casseroles, steak lunches and 60-cent hamburgers. It was also the beginning of a long decline for the all-American meat. In 1975, Americans on average ate close to 90 pounds of beef each year. That has now dipped to around 57 pounds, and chicken has assumed beef’s place as the most-consumed meat in the US.
Falling appetite for beef is good news for the environment. Beef produces 10 times the greenhouse gas emissions of poultry or pig meat and between 20 and 60 times more than many plant-based forms of protein. But to really work out where beef consumption might be headed, you need to look at who exactly is really into eating cows, and that’s where things get interesting.
Earlier this year a study from Tulane University in New Orleans found that a relatively small number of Americans are responsible for the lion’s share of beef consumption—and those eaters tend to skew older and male. But the beef industry isn’t content with the narrowing demographics of its customers—it has its eyes on creating a whole new generation of beef-eating stalwarts.
Diego Rose is the director of Tulane University’s nutrition program and one of the authors of the paper examining beef habits in the US. The research took data from a nationwide study conducted from 2015 through 2018 that asked adult Americans to recall which foods they had eaten in the previous 24 hours. The authors defined anyone who ate more than 4 ounces of beef a day—a little more than a single cooked hamburger—as a high consumer of beef, since US dietary guidelines recommend that adults eat no more than 4 ounces of meat, poultry, and eggs per day.
Over half of the survey respondents had eaten beef in the previous 24 hours, but what surprised Rose was just how few people were responsible for most of the beef consumption. According to his data, just 12 percent of people surveyed accounted for half of the total beef consumed. People who ate a lot of beef were more likely to be male and aged 50 to 65—roughly correlating with the baby boomer generation.
Today’s high consumers of beef likely grew up in the golden era of beef in the US, before rising prices and health fears associated with red meat made beef a less central part of the diet. “In general your dietary habits are inelastic,” says Rose. From around the age of young adulthood people tend to stick to foods they already know they like. People aged 66 or older were also less likely to be high consumers of beef—something that Rose says may be due to people cutting down due to advice from doctors. “My hunch is that life catches up with them,” he says.
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The Tulane study is only a snapshot of US diets, but it suggests that beef consumption divides along generational lines. Data from the mid-1990s, when beef consumption averaged 67 pounds per capita per year, found that men ate a lot more beef than women but that their consumption tended to peak in early adulthood before declining after age 39. These people who were eating a lot of beef in the mid-1990s might well be the same people who appear in Rose’s survey as today’s overconsumers of beef.
Hillary Makens, senior executive director of public relations at the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, disputes the findings of Rose’s study. Over email she shared data from the NCBA’s beef tracking survey that found that Gen Z and millennials were more likely than older respondents to have reported eating beef the previous day. When broken down by weekly consumption, 64 percent of Gen Z respondents said they ate beef in the previous week at least once—not far off the 69 percent of boomers and 71 percent of Gen Xers.
Declining beef availability can be explained by a number of factors, Makens says. “The biggest is that we have seen a shrinking of the herd as farmers and ranchers have battled drought and other weather conditions, and older generations have had to sell their land,” she says, also pointing out that according to industry data, beef demand has risen over the past 25 years.
Rose pointed out that his study and the NCBA’s surveys might not be directly comparable. “Consumer marketing surveys tend to be quick and dirty,” he says. “When you ask someone about a specific food, you are likely to get higher rates of consumption of that food than if you go through a rigorous 24-hour recall methodology where they report on everything that was consumed.”
Although the exact numbers may be disputed, it is clear that the beef industry is paying closer attention to younger Americans. The meat marketing agency Midan Marketing has published blog posts calling Gen Z “tomorrow’s meat industry” and urging beef marketers to tout their meat’s high protein content in order to appeal to younger consumers. The rise of marketing beef as “low carbon” might also be a way for the industry to appeal to younger generations who tend to be more engaged than older consumers with climate change.
“Unless beef consumption becomes remarkably sustainable, I think younger generations will always have a stronger moral opposition to eating beef on purely environmental grounds,” says Daniel Rosenfeld, a PhD student at the UCLA who studies the psychology of meat-eating. Our dietary choices are closely linked to our self-image and how we compare ourselves to others, Rosenfeld says, which means that people can respond strongly to suggestions that we should be cutting down on one food or another.
Meat consumption in particular is becoming highly politicized. In 2020 Rose coauthored a paper sketching out the greenhouse gas reductions that would happen if Americans significantly cut their meat intake. The study was picked up in the press. “How Biden’s Climate Plan Could Limit You to Eat Just One Burger a MONTH” ran a headline in the Daily Mail, a British right-wing newspaper, despite the fact that the then presidential-candidate hadn’t proposed any limit on meat consumption, and Rose’s paper didn’t mention Biden at all. On Twitter, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene dubbed Biden “The Hamburglar.”
“It’s silly,” Rose says, of beef’s politicization. “You can continue to eat beef, but in lower quantities.”
If beef consumption is concentrated among a relatively small group of people, that could be a useful way to focus campaigns to get people to reduce their meat intake. Some of those people are probably open to arguments about beef’s health and environmental impacts, Rose says, although the highest consumers of beef might also be those people who are most resistant to change, which could require a more delicate approach. “Nobody said anything about taking away your beef—we just said about maybe eating a little less of it,” Rose says.
