Small Animals Against Big Concerns
A lot of meat is consumed — here in Germany and worldwide. That's not news. However, it can still be surprising to realize the extent of it. Let's try to imagine how much that is based on data from the German Meat Atlas 2021 and information from ourworldindata.org.
So Much Meat
The world population is growing, and meat consumption per capita is increasing, but it is extremely unevenly distributed. It is particularly high in industrialized countries: in Germany, the average meat consumption per person in 2017 was nearly 60 kg per year - in the USA and Australia, it was over 100 kg. That's a lot. It's as much as adults weigh or roughly as much as 500 or 834 sausages weigh.
Global meat consumption has quadrupled in the past 50 years, reaching nearly 340 million tons in 2018 - requiring the slaughter of approximately 80 billion animals each year. That's over 200 million animals per day, 150,000 animals per minute - every minute.
Nothing New
Large parts of the consumed meat come from industrial mass animal farming. Besides ethical concerns, this is particularly problematic for the environment: there are high greenhouse gas emissions, high water and land usage, and biodiversity is threatened by monoculture feed production, which also involves very high pesticide use. Additionally, the systematic use of antibiotics among animals leads to antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
The Earth's resources are finite. It is foreseeable that this seemingly insatiable craving for meat and the finite availability of fertile land and water will cause conflicts.
They are already doing it - for example, when the feed for livestock in Europe comes from Latin America, where people are more frequently affected by poverty.