Let's begin with a few basic facts.

Fact number one, a lot of people all over the world really like to eat meat, especially

beef, pork, and chicken.

If you add the ball together, we're actually higher than we've been in recent history.

Let's Jason Lusk.

I'm a professor and head of the Agricultural Economics Department at Purdue University.

I study what we eat and why we eat it.

And then in terms of overall meat consumption per capita in the US, how do we rank worldwide?

We're the king of meat eaters, so compared to almost any other country in the world, we

eat more meat per capita.

Even Brazil, Argentina, yes?

Yes, and part of that difference is income-based.

So if you took Argentina and Brazil and adjusted for income, they would probably be consuming

more than us, but we happened to be richer, so we eat a little more.

The average American consumes roughly 200 pounds of meat a year.

That's an average, so let's say you're a meat eater and someone in your family's vegetarian,

you might be putting away 400 pounds a year.

But in America, at least, there aren't that many vegetarians.

I probably have the largest data set of vegetarians of any other researcher that I know.

Really?

Why?

I've been doing a survey of US food consumers every month for about five years, and one

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