Obviously just statistical error. The average person eats about the same amount of chicken. Chicken Georg, who lives in cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier and should not be counted.
Average person eats six times more chicken than in 1961, UN report finds | Agriculture is the second most polluting sector of the global economy
Submitted 1 week ago by usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml to unitedkingdom@feddit.uk
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jun/05/global-meat-supply-chicken-pork-fao-report
Comments
queermunist@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
pirc_lover@feddit.uk 1 week ago
I knew I’d find this here! Only critique is you forgot the ‘adn’ typo
SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
It’s so easy for people to do when the chickens are so conveniently tucked away out of sight
tenebrisnox@feddit.uk 1 week ago
The report:
does not go on to recommend they eat less meat
usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
The FAO, unfortunately, has quite a history in downplaying things and sticking their thumb on the scale in favor of the meat and dairy industry on things like this
In a sign of the atmosphere in the FAO at this time, a fourth veteran insider, “Mary Wagyu”, claims to have been admonished after preparing Meatless Monday leaflets for distribution in the cafeteria of an FAO heads of state food security summit in 2008. “Remove and destroy them,” a senior FAO executive said, according to Wagyu. “These will not be put in people’s trays.”
In 2009 a second FAO report called Livestock in the Balance was delayed for several months while the FAO’s leadership tried to dilute references to harm caused by the meat industry, arguing that this had already been covered by Livestock’s Long Shadow. When the research team resisted the pressure, management stepped in and manually rewrote key passages over their heads, sparking what Steinfeld called “a mini-revolution”. About a dozen staff members involved in preparing the report withdrew their names from the paper in protest.
[…]
Between 2012 and 2019, “the lobbyists obviously managed to influence things”, Holstein said. “They had a strong impact on the way things were done at the FAO and there was a lot of censorship. It was always an uphill struggle getting the documents you produced past the office for corporate communications and one had to fend off a good deal of editorial vandalism. You had to accept relatively small steps forward in changing the narrative on livestock.”
Steinfeld added that meat lobby representatives and diplomats would talk to senior FAO managers and encourage them not to invest in work that dealt with environmental impacts.
tenebrisnox@feddit.uk 1 week ago
Wow. But not surprising. I really don’t think most people realise how catastrophically damaging to the world’s environment the meat industry is (or the whole agricultural industry, really).
Eat_Your_Paisley@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I can believe that I’m pretty much chicken, fish, and a bit of pork guy.
AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Yeah that’s what happens when developing countries experience a rise in prosperity, they get access to meat and decent diets. Meat consumption may be slightly on the drop in the west, but that’s far outweighed by the rise everywhere else
Zombie@feddit.uk 1 week ago
Average person eats six times more chicken than in 1961, and also, there’s 2.67 more people (~3.1 billion people in 1961 versus ~8.3 billion today).
So the real terms increase is huge!
Watermark710@piefed.social 1 week ago
I’d like to see the stats on beef consumption. Cows are way worse for the planet when it comes to climate change. People eat more chicken than they used to because beef prices have skyrocketed. I wonder what the actual change in carbon emissions looks like.
usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
Graph from the article:
Image
Per capita beef consumption is down slightly, but not as much as chicken / poultry consumption has increased. People are generally eating much more meat overall per capita. Chicken and poultry still have a pretty heavy emissions profile, it’s just that beef is somehow worse. The net increase in meat consumption is still a massive net negative on the climate
In terms of ethics, switching to chicken results in significantly more induvidial chickens being killed because of their lower slaughter weight. The factory farms that house the vast majority of chickens keep growing larger and larger and quite disturbing. This is true around the world. For example just in England alone, there are at minimum over 700 factory farms for chickens, four of which have over a million chickens
Zombie@feddit.uk 1 week ago
Read the article. It says