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Comment by thriving_earthw | Hacker News Reader

We eat far more meat now at a time when far far fewer people are personally slaughtering animals than ever before in human history, so I think the claim checks out.

People who kill animals themselves regularly are probably subsistence farmers who consider meat a luxury, and what's more, the way they killed them was probably nothing like the incredibly high volume processing that goes on in a modern slaughterhouse.

I definitely think that if most people had to visit a modern factory farm and see the life cycle of one of these animals, kill it and process it, they would probably be shocked at what is legal.

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> We eat far more meat now

This statement is thrown around a lot, but it doesn't really check out. Per-capita meat consumption in most of the west is only around 66kg/year (increasing to 100-120kg/year for meat-heavy countries like Spain, Argentina, and the USA).

That's about one pig and a handful of birds - even many peasant populations could afford to raise that much meat each year. The well-off were consuming massively more meat that this throughout history. Not to mention the incredible quantities of fish consumed by coastal populations.

Records from Durham and Westminster cathedrals suggest monks were eating in excess of 400kg/year of meat and fish. Records from Italy in a similar period show labourers and even widows receiving in excess of 80kg/year of meat. And so on...

Most people in "developed" countries do not eat whole animals, but only selected parts of them.

So the number of dead animals per year needed to sustain a typical human is much greater.

For example someone who is a much more moderate meat eater than most, might eat at least half of their protein intake from vegetables, with the remainder from healthy chicken breast meat, eating around 1 kg of raw chicken breast per week, i.e. from 2 dead chicken.

That means 100 dead chicken per human per year, though it is likely that other less choosy humans would eat the thighs and a few other parts, so the 100 chicken would actually sustain between 2 and 3 humans for a year.

That is not a "handful" of birds.

Right, but that's purely reflective of a shift in meat preferences - a single pig would provide the same amount of meat as your 100 chickens. And historically, everyone ate pork and beef, not chicken (chicken doesn't become a major source of meat until after WWII).

The rest of the chicken isn't just thrown away.

Interesting to poke around in: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-meat-consumpti...

It sadly doesn't go back further than the 1960s. If you select Western Europe, the number seems to be falling (back from almost 100kg, though). USA, not so much.

Note though that for what your parent describes, you'd want numbers to go even further back, then you could likely see the whole effect of post-WW2 boom; though WW2 itself would obviously also extremely skew the data in the 40s.

>Records from Durham and Westminster cathedrals suggest monks were eating in excess of 400kg/year of meat and fish.

I feel like I eat quite a lot of meat. And even I find that number rather suspect. Over a kilo a day? They did also do labour, but still that sounds extremely high even for pure carnivore diet of today... Or then there is some sort of significant waste.

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