Meat

Although global patterns of food consumption still remain highly diverse, there are certain points of convergence. The most significant is the incorporation of expensive, high-quality meat and dairy products in the diet. This trend is reflected in the growing international trade in foods, the global diffusion of fast-food chains and an expansion of US and European eating habits. This process started among the present OECD countries after the Second World War. It coincides with what the agrarian sociologists Harriet Friedmann and Philip McMichael (1989) have characterized as the second international food regime. The striking difference in the present situation is the rapid rise in the consumption of meat and dairy products in the global South, in particular in East and Southeast Asia and in the oil-rich Middle East (Delgado et al. 2001). China is by far the most spectacular case. China has moved from a per capita consumption of barely 6 kg to over 50 kg at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The same pattern is visible in countries like South Korea and other rapidly growing Asian economies, whereas Japan went through the same process a couple of decades earlier. There are, however, parts of the world that are entirely left out of this process, most notably sub-Saharan Africa. ¹