Meat demand has been a frequent topic on this blog (e.g., see here, here, here, or here). As some of the previous posts indicate, “demand” is a hard thing to measure. A slightly easier thing to measure is spending. As it turns out, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has been tracking consumer spending at the household level on food at home in a number of categories, including beef, pork, and poultry, in their annual Consumer Expenditure Survey.
Using these data, I constructed the following animation showing the relationship between spending on beef and total household expenditures by quintiles of income.
The figure shows, at any point in time, higher income households (or those with greater total spending) spend more on beef than lower income households (or those with less total spending). In econ-speak, beef is a “normal” good. However, for any given income (or total spending) level, spending on beef has fallen precipitously since 1984 (all figures are in inflation-adjusted 2017 dollars). The change over time is most dramatic for the higher income/spending households. In 1984, the lowest and highest quintile income households spent $265 and $681 per year (in 2017 dollars), respectively, on beef for consumption at home. By 2017, these figures had fallen to $158 and 352, respectively.
These data could be reflective of downward demand shift - i.e., consumers willing to pay less for each pound of beef than they were in the past. Other possible explanations for the downward decline in spending include changing beef prices over this period, changing household demographics (the average number of people in today’s households is slightly smaller today than in the mid 1980s; fewer people normally means less spending), other protein sources, such as poultry, becoming relatively less expensive or more attractive, a shift toward more food spending away from home (the BLS only tracks spending for individual food categories for food eaten at home), and more.
How do the data in the above figure square with measures of demand (such as these constructed by Glynn Tonsor), which show no clear trend in beef demand since the early 1990s? Well, as I mentioned above, spending isn’t “demand” because while the figure controls for income, it doesn’t control for prices. Another possible explanation is that the data in the figure above are for households, while aggregate demand statistics like those created by Tonsor are calculated nationally. It is possible for total aggregate demand to rise even if each individual household’s demand is falling if population is increasing and more households are being added. That is, in fact, what has happened. There were about 86 million households in the US in 1984. Today there are about 128 million households.