Matthew C Klein, Columnist

What Do People Have Against Eating Steak?

What explains the persistent decline in the Americans' appetite for beef?

January 15, 2014 at 6:05 PM UTC

Matthew C. Klein writes for Bloomberg View about the economy and financial markets. He previously wrote for the Economist magazine and its economics blog, Free Exchange. Before that, Klein was a research associate at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he spent more than two years studying the history of the Federal Reserve and the intellectual history of monetary economics for an upcoming book by Sebastian Mallaby. He also worked at Bridgewater Associates, where he studied the economies of Central and Eastern Europe and advised institutional investors on asset-liability management. Klein has a bachelor's degree in history from Yale University. Originally from Chicago, he lives in New York.

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U.S. beef production has been falling since 2002, while the size of America's enormous cattle herd is now smaller than at any point since 1952. U.S. beef consumption, meanwhile, has tumbled by about 38 percent since 1976. What gives?

One reason, highlighted in an excellent Bloomberg News article, is bad weather. Droughts have destroyed pasture land and made corn feed more expensive. That has made it costlier to raise cattle, which in turn has increased the relative cost of beef compared to chicken and pork.