2 minute read

U.S. Per Capita Consumption of Poultry and LivestockPermalink

About Makeover MondayPermalink

MakeoverMonday is a social data project: “Each week we post a link to a chart, and its data, and then you rework the chart. Maybe you retell the story more effectively, or find a new story in the data. We’re curious to see the different approaches you all take. Whether it’s a simple bar chart or an elaborate infographic, we encourage everyone of all skills to partake. Together we can have broader conversations about and with data.”

Starting from Jan 08, 2018, I decided to put aside one hour on Monday weekly to create some visualization and find some insights from the data.

The datasets are published each week at: MakeoverMonday Datasets.

Makeover Monday 1227Permalink

You may be wondering 12/27 is not a Monday, why I am doing a Makeover Monday. This is because I started doing Makeover Monday since 01/08, but missed the 01/01 one… To make up that one and to hit the target of finishing all the 53 sessions of Makeover Monday (yes I am a perfectionism), I decided to add a session today to work on the 01/01 dataset.
The dataset on 01/01 is about the US Per Capita Consumption of Poultry and Livestock. It’s surpising to see how people inclining towards poultry over time. You can find the original viz here, which is simple and effective.

My VisualizationPermalink

Trying to tell the story, I put one chart of absolute number trend with annotations, one chart of the relative difference trend, and another one comparing 1960 and 2015 consumption composition.


Please notice that all the visualizations are designed for desktop view, so it is recommended to view them on a desktop device.

InsightsPermalink

  • Total meat consumption per capita in US has increased from 16k pounds to 22k pounds, increased by 34%;
  • The per capita consumption of Poultry has increased more than 2x since 1960, surpassed Pork consumption in 1975, and surpassed Beef consumption in 1988;
  • Beef consumption peaked in 1976, but has been decreasing since then. Comparing to 1960, it has decreased by 15% now;
  • Fish consumption has been growing slowly.

Btw, curious about why we see red meat consumption dropped a lot, I did some research online. As this article addressed, red meat has been linked to cancer since 1970s. Also, producing beef is much more environmentally costly (see MakeoverMonday 1210), and beef price is much higher than poultry.

Follow this link to find more weekly vizzes :)