Meat

America has been a meat-eating nation from the days of the Native American hunter-gatherer societies, blessed as it was by extensive fertile lands and (at least in most parts) a benign climate that supported a variety of wildlife. Selectively harvested wild animals, from squirrels to birds to bison, were integral parts of the diet of early European settlers and of successive waves of American migrants who pushed back the fringes of the wilderness. The expansion of farming in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries stabilized the consumption of meat by ensuring a steady supply of domesticated livestock. The scattered and incomplete information available indicates that annual per capita meat consumption reached approximately 150 pounds in the early 1700s and remained at that level, give or take 20 percent, until the 1950s.