How many pounds of beef does the average American eat per year?

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Cifra · Accepted Answer

59 pounds. Per-capita beef availability is about 59 pounds a year, down from a peak near 90 pounds in 1976. Chicken overtook beef in the early 1990s and Americans now eat roughly 100 pounds of it a year, mostly because it got much cheaper relative to beef. Estimate weekly and multiply. A burger, a steak or a portion of mince a couple of times a week is somewhere around half a kilo weekly, which over fifty-two weeks gives tens of kilos — and converting to pounds lands you close to the figure. The trend is the interesting part: down by a third from a peak in the mid-1970s. Consumption of a staple protein falling that far over fifty years is a substantial dietary shift, and it happened without anyone deciding it — the explanation names the mechanism. Chicken is the mechanism. It overtook beef in the early 1990s and is now eaten at nearly double the rate, primarily because industrial poultry production got dramatically cheaper while beef did not. Dietary change at national scale is usually a price story rather than a health story, and this is the clearest example.

Source	USDA Economic Research Service
Figure refers to	2023
Last checked	September 1, 2026
Unit	pounds

How many pounds of beef does the average American eat per year?

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