The report:
does not go on to recommend they eat less meat
this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2026
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The FAO, unfortunately, has quite a history in downplaying things and sticking their thumb on the scale in favor of the meat and dairy industry on things like this
In a sign of the atmosphere in the FAO at this time, a fourth veteran insider, “Mary Wagyu”, claims to have been admonished after preparing Meatless Monday leaflets for distribution in the cafeteria of an FAO heads of state food security summit in 2008. “Remove and destroy them,” a senior FAO executive said, according to Wagyu. “These will not be put in people’s trays.”
In 2009 a second FAO report called Livestock in the Balance was delayed for several months while the FAO’s leadership tried to dilute references to harm caused by the meat industry, arguing that this had already been covered by Livestock’s Long Shadow. When the research team resisted the pressure, management stepped in and manually rewrote key passages over their heads, sparking what Steinfeld called “a mini-revolution”. About a dozen staff members involved in preparing the report withdrew their names from the paper in protest.
[...]
Between 2012 and 2019, “the lobbyists obviously managed to influence things”, Holstein said. “They had a strong impact on the way things were done at the FAO and there was a lot of censorship. It was always an uphill struggle getting the documents you produced past the office for corporate communications and one had to fend off a good deal of editorial vandalism. You had to accept relatively small steps forward in changing the narrative on livestock.”
Steinfeld added that meat lobby representatives and diplomats would talk to senior FAO managers and encourage them not to invest in work that dealt with environmental impacts.
Average person eats six times more chicken than in 1961, and also, there's 2.67 more people (~3.1 billion people in 1961 versus ~8.3 billion today).
So the real terms increase is huge!
I'd like to see the stats on beef consumption. Cows are way worse for the planet when it comes to climate change. People eat more chicken than they used to because beef prices have skyrocketed. I wonder what the actual change in carbon emissions looks like.
Graph from the article:
Per capita beef consumption is down slightly, but not as much as chicken / poultry consumption has increased. People are generally eating much more meat overall per capita. Chicken and poultry still have a pretty heavy emissions profile, it's just that beef is somehow worse. The net increase in meat consumption is still a massive net negative on the climate
In terms of ethics, switching to chicken results in significantly more induvidial chickens being killed because of their lower slaughter weight. The factory farms that house the vast majority of chickens keep growing larger and larger and quite disturbing. This is true around the world. For example just in England alone, there are at minimum over 700 factory farms for chickens, four of which have over a million chickens
Read the article. It says
Ah, I had tried to, but there was a giant popup asking me for money, so I thought it wasn't available for free. Turns out, my PiP window was covering the button to collapse the popup. Apparently beef has stayed steady, which is nuts IMO. Most people I know eat a lot less beef than they used to. My best buddy used to have a steak every Friday, now he only eats it on his birthday.
Obviously just statistical error. The average person eats about the same amount of chicken. Chicken Georg, who lives in cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier and should not be counted.
I can believe that I'm pretty much chicken, fish, and a bit of pork guy.
It's so easy for people to do when the chickens are so conveniently tucked away out of sight