Meat Consumption

Why is meat consumption important to world?

There are several arguments against consumption of meat:

• Health risks: Diets high in red and processed meats are associated with diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancers

• Greenhouse emission: Meat consumption is responsible for releasing greenhouse gases such as methane, CO2, and nitrous oxide.

• water usage: It takes a lot of water to produce meat, raising livestock

• Soil degradation: Raising animals often requires a lot of grazing land. However, the intensive nature of this grazing can lead to bare soil

It can be seen that meat consumption has high impact on environment and human lives, so it worth more analyzations.

What are the world's meat production change with time?

From the first Rshiny bar plot, we observe that China, USA and India's meat produced are increasing every 10 years. It is clear that the world's meat production shows an increasing trend by locations. While Asia stands for the most meat production continent which do make sense since Asia is the continent with most populations. Therefore, we can conclude that although meat consumption might cause negative impact on world environment and human health, the world's meat consumption and production still increase over time and will keep increasing in the future. In other words, the world may require more meats in the next few decades. So it is crucial to analyze the impact of consuming meat.

What are major kinds of meat we eat ?

We can see from the donut chart that pork is the most common type of meat we consume and chicken rank as the second followed by red meats (beef and lamb). Bases on the chart, red meat (pork , beef and lamb) takes approximately 66% of the meat world consumed. Additionally, the conversion of protein of consuming red meat is all below 10%, which means more than 90% of the nutrition and protein were lost when consuming red meat. According to the cancer research from UK, it is clear that consuming too much red meat is at high risk of causing cancer. Therefore, people now in the world are suffering from a higher risks of cancer and a lower protein absorption issues due to over-consuming of red meat including pork beef and lamb.

What are costs of raising livestocks for meat consumption?

We can observe that the conversion ratio of feeding beef is the highest among all meat types. In return of producing one kilogram of red meat (beef, lamb and pork) costs much more animal feeds (including feeds and water). We see that it takes 8 times of resources to feed 1kg of beef than poultry and around 4 times of resources to produce 1 kg of beef than pork. As a result, soybean farming (for animal feed) is relatively inefficient when it comes to water usage compared to growing other types of fruits and vegetables. Furthermore, Raising animals often requires a lot of grazing land. However, intensive grazing would cause bare soil and thus causing negative impact on environment.

The world is consuming more meat than in the past.However, There are plenty of negative impact on consuming too much red meats including environment problem and human health issues. In conclusion, it is helpful to both yourself and environment to consume more kinds of food other than too much meat, especially processed meat and red meat.