Hi there, just coming across this for the first time—great resources and analysis, thank you! (I’m a researcher at the Humane and Sustainable Food Lab at Stanford and just wrapped up a meta-analysis on efforts to get people to reduce consumption of meat and animal products, most of which took place in the US and EU—here’s a forum summary). A few general observations:
In general, data collection in LMICs is a hard problem. If you look at a heat deaths per capita chart, it looks like Europe does a lot worse than Africa, which is substantially hotter and poorer. That’s probably about record-keeping rather than heat adaptations. So if I read that meat consumption is unusually low in Botswana or Nigeria, my first thought is ‘data issues.’
I’m not sure how to think about this question for Slovakia or Thailand. Slovakia was LMIC in the 90s but not today, but if you look at the Wikipedia page on Slovakian cusines, almost everything pictured has meat in it. Thailand is middle-income today, but I lived in Thailand in 2012 and being vegetarian was a big challenge. Maybe the right way to think about this is that Thai dishes typically have a little bit of meat in them but not a lot, e.g. fish sauce in a curry and a few shrimp is just a lot more of a balanced meal than a burger or steak or whatever. But maybe the data are just not reliable. What do you think? Big picture, do you trust the data you collect on meat consumption per capita?
Hi there, just coming across this for the first time—great resources and analysis, thank you! (I’m a researcher at the Humane and Sustainable Food Lab at Stanford and just wrapped up a meta-analysis on efforts to get people to reduce consumption of meat and animal products, most of which took place in the US and EU—here’s a forum summary). A few general observations:
In general, data collection in LMICs is a hard problem. If you look at a heat deaths per capita chart, it looks like Europe does a lot worse than Africa, which is substantially hotter and poorer. That’s probably about record-keeping rather than heat adaptations. So if I read that meat consumption is unusually low in Botswana or Nigeria, my first thought is ‘data issues.’
I’m not sure how to think about this question for Slovakia or Thailand. Slovakia was LMIC in the 90s but not today, but if you look at the Wikipedia page on Slovakian cusines, almost everything pictured has meat in it. Thailand is middle-income today, but I lived in Thailand in 2012 and being vegetarian was a big challenge. Maybe the right way to think about this is that Thai dishes typically have a little bit of meat in them but not a lot, e.g. fish sauce in a curry and a few shrimp is just a lot more of a balanced meal than a burger or steak or whatever. But maybe the data are just not reliable. What do you think? Big picture, do you trust the data you collect on meat consumption per capita?
The Animal Welfare Economics Working Group is putting together a data library that might be helpful for future investigations in this vein.