📊 Animal Slaughter
You're probably underestimating the number of animals killed each year for meat consumption.
Welcome to Latinometrics. We bring you Latin American insights and trends through concise, thought-provoking data visualizations.
Food 🐔
If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.
When Sir Paul McCartney said that, he had a point: nobody, not even the biggest meat junkie in the world, wants to think about animals being butchered on conveyor belts.
Most of the world today lives with the reality that many of our favorite foods – be it chicken, beef, pork, lamb, or even seafood – requires us to kill, at an industrial scale, a whole lot of animals. After all, only about 20% of the world follows a plant-based diet, of which only roughly 75M people actually choose said diet as a lifestyle choice (the others might not be able to find, afford, or consume meat).
Many vegetarians are morally opposed to the way the livestock industry contributes to climate change through environmental degradation and carbon emissions, or even the labor conditions seen within the industry overall. However, most are primarily opposed to meat consumption on bioethical grounds, rejecting the wholesale butchery of billions of animals worldwide annually, which brings us to our chart.
We’re setting aside fisheries and seafood for this one, but we’re sure you’ll find the numbers nonetheless staggering. China and the United States alone slaughtered roughly 30B animals in 2021. Meanwhile, Latin America’s two biggest countries of Brazil and Mexico are meat giants in their own right, and growing steadily.
This is far from surprising, particularly at the Brazilian level. From its legendary churrascos to its massive halal exports to the Middle East and North Africa, Brazil is perhaps best known abroad for its high-quality beef. In fact, Brazilian multinational firm JBS is the world’s largest meatpacking firm, and its prominent role in Brazilian politics is as cemented as it is controversial.
The reality of the situation is that as long as an overwhelming majority of the world consumes – even loves – meat, there will always be a major market ready to meet that demand. Chicken (which makes up 88% of the slaughters you see above) and meat are as integral to the Brazilian economy today as soy, if not more, and that’s unlikely to go anywhere anytime soon.
We’re not in the business of prescribing philosophies or lifestyle choices to our readers. As always, though, we hope this chart sheds some light on the very real figures here…and perhaps serves as our own little glass wall into the slaughterhouse.
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Comment of the Week 🗣️
Let’s end this newsletter on a positive note. Simon Perez Cordova recaps the last Mexican to get a Nobel prize — Mario Molina, who helped protect our beautiful Earth. From our timeline of Nobel winners on LinkedIn.
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Toxins become more concentrated the higher on the food chain.
Eat low on the food chain.
For your own and the planet's health.
It is only our limited senses that prevent us from hearing the screams of plants and the stress of those that surround them as they are pulled from the ground. All life wishes to survive. Read "The Secret Life of Plants".