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What If The United States Was Vegan? A Plant-Based Country
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Mar 31, 2025
Meat symbolizes the United States in ways that few other things truly can. From hamburgers and hotdogs to barbecue and steak, meat has come to represent a disproportionate share of American's diets over the last few decades. This has come at great cost to the environment and natural resources of the world. Which begs the question: what would it take for a nation of 330 million people to stop eating meat and what would the ramifications of such an meatless endeavor be? What if the United States was fully vegan?
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The United States eats a lot of meat
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Americans will often have some portion of meat at every meal of their day. And if their meals don't have meat directly
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then they at least have some other byproduct of livestock such as dairy or eggs
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But while meat is very popular in America, it also comes at a high cost to the planet
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So what if the United States was vegan? Hello and welcome to What If Geography
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where we try and answer the great geographic what-if questions of the world
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I'm your host, Jeff Gibson, and today we're talking about meat. The grilling, sizzling, juicy flesh of animals
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has been a mainstay of Americans' diets for the last hundred years. And there's a reason for this
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But full disclosure, I am not a vegan myself. However, I would consider myself meat-light
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and definitely see the value in eating less meat overall. So with that out of the way, let's dig in
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Historically, meat was never a big part of the diet of an average person
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Prior to the industrial and agricultural revolutions, meat was almost exclusively consumed by the very wealthy
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This was because most animals that were eaten during this time were wild animals that were hunted
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Any domesticated farm animals, such as cows and chickens, were often kept alive for the duration of their life
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in order to produce milk, cheese, and eggs. There were butcher shops, of course, so meat was available
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but it was still fairly expensive and often out of reach for most people on a daily basis
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Fast forward to the Industrial Revolution, and we start to see this trend change quite a bit
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You see, the Industrial Revolution not only revolutionized how things were made
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but also where people lived. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, society at large was still mostly rural
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and a large part of the population still farmed on a daily basis to make a living
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As populations swelled in cities, the middle class grew and people had more disposable income
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and this necessitated the need for food to be delivered to them. To serve this new market, large cattle ranches were established west of the Mississippi River
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Between 1865 and 1875, railroads expanded into the Mississippi and Ohio Valley regions
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and cattle were shipped to these new ranches in order to raise cow for beef. Railroad cattle cars were then used to transport livestock to large eastern packing houses
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Cincinnati, Buffalo, Milwaukee, and Chicago all became centers of the meat packing industry
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There the cattle were slaughtered and the meat was prepared to be sent to other major cities across the country The rest is as we say history As America became wealthier as a country its people became wealthier
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And with that added wealth directly contributed to an increase in meat consumption amongst more
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and more people. The meat industry has turned into just that, a huge mega industry with the
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intent to increase the amount of meat Americans eat even from the current highs of today
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Meat is everywhere. From fast food to steak dinners, meat has become a mainstay of American
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culinary culture. But before we get into the geographic ramifications of a meat-heavy diet
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of Americans, if you're enjoying this video, now would be a great time to subscribe
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More fun what-if geography videos are just a single click away. As we've already established, Americans eat a lot of meat. That's probably not a surprise to
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anyone watching this video right now, but it's still probably more than you think. As of 2021
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Americans eat on average just about 274 pounds of meat per year
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not including seafood. So just beef, chicken, pork, lamb, and other meats
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Since 1961, the total amount of meat consumed in the U.S. has increased by about 40%
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In 2017, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that Americans are exceeding the
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amount of meat recommended by national dietary guidelines. It's worth pointing out that the USDA's guidance is already heavily influenced by the meat industry
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so their recommendations aren't always in line with other health-based organizations such as the American Heart Association
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But not all meat is created equally. American diets have historically been most associated with what we would call red meat
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which is beef, lamb, and pork generally. There are other red meats as well, but as far as American diets are concerned
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those are the big ones. And really, beef is the really big one
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Recall that back when the Industrial Revolution was kicking off, large cattle ranches and meatpacking industries sprung up to feed beef to the population at large
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The good news here is that since about 1970, the average amount of beef consumed by an American
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in a single year has decreased from its height of about 112 pounds to 81 pounds in 2017
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That's a sizable decrease. However, there's a big caveat with this data
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Even though the average American is eating less red meat overall, as a country, we're eating far more
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That's because the population of the United States has increased from about 203 million
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to over 330 million today. If we math this out a bit
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In 1970 the amount of beef consumed by the entire U population would equate to roughly 22 billion pounds of red meat Today that amount would be 26 billion pounds of red meat And of course even with the reduction of red meat Americans are still eating more meat
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today than they were 50 years ago. And the reason for this consumption increase is because of
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chicken. Since the mid-1990s, chicken has officially become the meat that Americans eat
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most. Today, a single American will consume roughly 123 pounds of chicken on average
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every single year. In order to feed this ravenous chicken-loving population, somewhere around 25 million birds are slaughtered daily. Just think about that for a moment
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Regardless of your stance on eating meat, that is a truly staggering amount of chickens killed
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every single day. Which raises the question, what does it take to even manage all of these
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animals running through our system in such a volume? The answer, quite a bit
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As it turns out, the meat industry is not an environmentally friendly one
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In order to state our collective cravings for chicken wings and hamburgers, the meat industry uses a lot of resources
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To give an example, to make just a single hamburger's worth of beef, somewhere around 660 gallons of water will be used
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This is, of course, all-inclusive of the needs to make that hamburger, including growing the grain for feeding the cow
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Nevertheless, the process to make meat is a water-intensive one, which is not super great considering that basically half the contiguous United States
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is under some form of drought at the moment. Speaking of land, the meat industry takes up a staggeringly large amount of space
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When factoring in land needed to grow crops for feed and land for cattle to graze on
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fully 41% of the contiguous United States is used to support and supply the meat industry
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To put this in perspective, if we take all of America's cities and urban areas
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it would equate to only 3.6% of the U.S. If we took all of the land we use to grow crops that are made for human food
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so everything from lettuce to wheat to apples to cherries, it would take up only 4% of the U.S
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During a time of worldwide wheat shortage, it seems like we could spare an extra percentage point or two
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to grow additional food for people. And of course, we can't talk about the meat industry
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without talking about climate change. Because while meat uses a lot of water and takes up a lot of land
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it also causes a lot of climate change-inducing emissions. Now, according to the Environmental Protection Agency
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the current meat industry creates roughly 10% of the U.S.'s total emissions
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Not nothing, but certainly lower than the transportation and energy industries. However, one thing that the EPA's estimates leave out is the aforementioned land use
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Whenever we dedicate land to cattle we are also actively removing things like forests which capture much of our carbon Where this is most acutely seen today is not in the US at all but rather in Brazil where ranchers continually cut
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more and more of the Amazon rainforest in order to add grazing pastures for cattle. And those who
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only eat fish and seafood certainly aren't immune from causing environmental harm and degradation
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Humans have such a voracious appetite for seafood that scientists are predicting a collapse of all
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seafood fisheries by 2050. That is very bad. All that's to say is, the meat industry in the US is
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certainly a big contributor to climate change no matter how you slice it. Which begs the question
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what if we all just stopped eating meat entirely? A future with no meat is actually a really big challenge to conceptualize
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If you remove meat from the diet of 330 million Americans, it needs to be replaced with non-meat
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crops. But not just any crops will do. Meat happens to supply specific nutrients and minerals
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that simply don't exist in many fruits and vegetables. And the current U.S. crop production
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is not equipped to supply the fruits and vegetables that would be needed. But it's not impossible
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One study, completed in 2017, made an attempt at looking at the ramifications and needs of a
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United States that did not eat meat. And in it, they found that U.S. crop production would need
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to grow considerably. And many of those new crops would need to be legumes. Of course
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the primary benefit of a meat-free United States would be the sheer amount of land that would be
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available for reforesting. It's estimated that if the United States could reforest 200,000 square
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miles of land, roughly the size of one and a quarter Californias, it would remove 333 million
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metric tons of carbon every single year. So not only would eating less meat actively remove climate
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change inducing emissions, but would also provide additional land for forests, which would then
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capture even more carbon. It would tackle climate change from two sides, and that's super important
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The reality is that a meat-free United States is not necessary. But what would be nice is simply a country that eats less meat overall
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The meat industry is not sustainable and is causing long-term irreparable damage to the planet
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All in the name of feeding people too much meat. This of course would not be profitable for the meat industrial complex
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but it would go a long way to ensuring we have a sustainable, long-lasting planet for future generations
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I hope you enjoyed today's episode on a meat-free United States. If you did, please subscribe to my channel
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And if you want to watch more of my videos, you can do so right here
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Thanks for watching. See you next time
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