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A Land Flowing with Pork and Beef: Colonial America’s Rise to the World’s Meat Consumption Capital
When European settlers arrived in North America, they enjoyed a level of meat consumption that was absolutely unimaginable in the Old World. An average European was lucky to see meat once a week while even a poor American consumed about two hundred pounds a year. Ten years after the starving Plymouth colonists subsisted on wild game and Squanto's help, the Massachusetts Bay Colony found the environment so favorable for pigs and cows they didn't know what to do with all the extra food. A man who visited Pennsylvania in the 1750s marveled at the abundance of beef cattle. “[E]ven in the…
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