Why some Americans are eating more meat, and others are eating more vegetarian meals

In recent decades, the average American has steadily increased their consumption of meat, milk, and eggs, to a staggering 224 pounds of red meat and poultry, 280 eggs, 20.5 pounds of fish, and 667 pounds of dairy per year — among the highest rates in the world. The dominance of animal products on Americans’ plates has had grave consequences for animals, nearly all of which are factory-farmed, and has also accelerated climate change and the polluting of America’s waterways.

But these numbers are just population-wide averages — they don’t tell us much about the diverse range of dietary habits among 335 million Americans, nor about how many people swear off meat and other animal products altogether.

Understanding rates of vegetarianism and veganism, in particular, is tricky because people aren’t always reliable narrators of their own diets. Somewhere between 2 to 6 percent of Americans surveyed say they’re vegetarian, but many of these same people also report they’ve recently consumed meat.

Surveys on vegetarianism and meat consumption are “notoriously unreliable,” Zach Freitas-Groff, an economist at the University of Texas at Austin, told me.

In an attempt to understand what people are actually eating, Freitas-Groff and two fellow economists — Trevor Woolley at the University of California, Berkeley and Carl Meyer at Stanford University — reviewed people’s grocery receipts. The team analyzed tens of thousands of households’ grocery purchases from 2005 to 2020 to see how Americans’ meat consumption had changed over time. Their findings were published in June as a working paper — not yet peer-reviewed, so the results should be viewed as tentative — by the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Their findings represent a growing chasm in American meat consumption: The number of households that avoid meat has increased slightly, while all other households have increased their meat purchases by an average of nearly 15 percent by weight relative to other foods. Overall grocery sales declined during this period, as Americans ate more of their meals outside the home, but as a share of groceries, meat purchases increased significantly.

From 2005 to 2020, the share of households that didn’t purchase any meat at the grocery store increased from 4.1 to 4.6 percent — a 12 percent jump. The share of households purchasing no animal products — meat, milk, or eggs — doubled, from a tiny 0.5 percent to a still-tiny 1 percent.

“The increase in meat avoiders is promising, but over 15 years, the increase appears very modest,” Joshua Tasoff, an economics professor at Claremont Graduate University who was not involved in the study, told Vox in an email.

The authors are hesitant to make sweeping generalizations about the state of American meat consumption based on these findings. The study only looked at food purchased at the grocery store, they note, which accounts for about two-thirds of caloric intake, while the other third is eaten at restaurants and schools, which was not included in the study. The data also excludes meat sold at grocery store deli counters, including both raw meat and meat in prepared deli dishes.

But the paper provides a more granular view into consumers’ relationship with meat than we’ve had before, dovetailing with other recent research findings, like a 2023 study showing that just 12 percent of Americans — mostly men and older people — eat 50 percent of the nation’s beef.

Tasoff called the study an “impressive paper” that uses the best available data for consumer analysis.

The study’s time period, from 2005 to 2020, coincides with a growth in news coverage of farm animal welfare — a time in which numerous animal rights groups grew from tiny grassroots organizations into well-oiled machines; undercover investigations into factory farms gained national attention; around a dozen states passed farm animal welfare laws; cultural icons like Beyoncé and Billie Eilish promoted the benefits of plant-based eating; and plant-based meat and milk, made by companies such as Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods, and Oatly, went mainstream.

But can increased media attention on factory farming — resulting from a growth in animal rights activism — and better vegetarian products explain the shift away from meat among a small but increasing share of American households? That might be part of it, the researchers concluded, but most of the shift, they found, can be attributed to other factors, including rising meat prices.

Digging into the data on America’s shifting meat consumption

Around two-thirds of the increase in meat avoidance, the researchers estimate, is attributable to higher meat prices and to people buying less food at grocery stores and more at restaurants and elsewhere.

The remaining third? Some of it could stem from older generations dying and younger people becoming heads of households. According to the paper, households in which the head was born after 1980 are 50 percent more likely to avoid meat and around twice as likely not to buy any animal products compared to other households.

In 2004, these households made up just 1 percent of the sample; by 2020, they accounted for 15 percent. If this trend holds, it could lead to a continued increase in households abstaining from meat in the decades to come, representing a bright spot in the paper’s otherwise discouraging findings. (Younger generations also tend to report higher rates of vegetarianism, flexitarianism, pescetarianism, and veganism in surveys.)

The difference among age groups is even more stark when looking at rates of all animal product avoidance. About 2.5 percent of households whose heads were born after 1990 didn’t purchase any animal products; for other age groups, the share hovers around 0.5 to 1 percent.

Though the study didn’t attempt to explain why younger people are avoiding animal products at such higher rates, it’s not unreasonable to think that animal advocacy — often directed at younger generations — could be changing social mores. That said, younger consumers have less money, so they could be more sensitive to rising meat prices, and they’re also more likely to eat away from home.

The researchers also looked at whether the growth in media coverage of factory farming played a role in meat avoidance.

It “depends on the model we use,” Woolley wrote in an email. “Taken all together, it looks like media coverage probably played a role, but it’s hard to determine the magnitude of the effect given that it isn’t consistently statistically significant (unlike the effect of prices and total grocery purchase volume). It does seem to hold some explanatory power though.”

A 2011 study found that from 1991 to 2008, media coverage of cruelty on pig and poultry farms led to reduced demand for pork and poultry by 2.6 percent and 5 percent, respectively.

As for the role of plant-based meat alternatives, while they’ve generated a lot of buzz in the media and pop culture, and the sector’s sales have grown significantly in recent years, it’s still far too small a market to explain why more households have moved away from meat. The study found that plant-based meat products had no discernible displacement effect on animal meat sales. However, some of the most popular brands, like Beyond Meat and Impossible, didn’t become widely available in grocery stores until the final years of the data used in the paper.

Plant-based milks like oat and soy, however, displaced cow’s milk on a nearly 1-to-1 basis.

Meat’s price isn’t right

The overall picture painted by the study is grim for factory-farmed animals and our warming planet. A small number of households have started avoiding meat at the grocery store in recent decades, but they’re overshadowed by all other households, which seem to be buying more meat.

The findings illustrate how critical the price of meat is to consumer behavior — a reality that’s painfully obvious to economists but often neglected in advocacy focused on animal cruelty. Work to change people’s hearts and minds may only go so far; changing the sticker price consumers see at the grocery store would likely have a much greater impact.

Despite rising food prices over the last two decades, meat and other animal products remain relatively cheap. That’s not because raising and slaughtering animals is an inexpensive endeavor, but because livestock companies have been exhaustively deregulated, which in turn has diffused their costs throughout society.

Farmed animals pay the cost with their suffering, as do wild animals in the form of mass deforestation and polluted rivers. Many farmers pay the cost by taking on a mountain of debt, while slaughterhouse workers pay the cost in lost fingers and limbs. Ultimately, all of us pay it in the form of climate change and increasingly ineffective antibiotics.

If livestock producers were to internalize these costs — and if we were to do away with much of the subsidies doled out to industry — meat would cost a lot more, causing some consumers to reduce or eliminate their meat purchasing.

According to True Price, a Dutch nonprofit that estimates the environmental cost of food, internalizing the environmental harms alone (excluding costs like animal cruelty and public health) of certain animal products would increase their price between two- and five-fold:

Advocating for raising meat prices, especially after an election in which inflation and rising grocery bills played a major role in ousting the incumbent party, feels — to put it lightly — insensitive and politically risky. But at the same time, consumers enjoy low meat prices at a steep cost to society, while polluting meat companies celebrate record profits. Some governments are reconsidering this longstanding deregulatory paradigm.

Just this week, the Danish government passed a modest tax on livestock emissions, and it’s also investing in programs to make plant-based foods, which are much more environmentally friendly than meat, more affordable. If we’re serious about ensuring planet Earth is habitable for future generations, and mitigating one of humanity’s greatest moral crimes, the rest of us will need to follow their lead.