Meat and Booze: The Recipe for Happiness?

A friend recently forwarded me the above infographic, a nifty little chart illustrating some of the larger and smaller meat consumers in the world, and exactly how much animal flesh we devour (or shy away from) per capita every year.  According to the fine folks at GOOD:

An increase in the consumption of meat is directly correlated to an increase in a country’s economic development.  As a country becomes richer, its citizens generally eat more meat, a much denser source of protein than is available in poorer countries.  But the range of the amount of meat eaten in different countries around the world is truly astounding, from being barely enough for a few hamburgers to the weight of several people.  This is a look at which countries are eating the most meat every year, on a per capita basis, and which are eating the least.

It’s a slick graphic, not necessarily political, but one of those images that pops up on the Internet to get your gears turning upstairs.  I particularly enjoyed the way the authors gave us a frame of reference by listing the average weight of everyday objects, then totaling them up for us (apparently, I ate a pig, twenty-five chickens and a hot dog last year).  On the other hand, I quickly took umbrage at the notion that, if you’re going to use the classic USDA beef primal cut chart to illustrate your numbers, why give the USA the bottom round?  Butt steak!  I thought that, at 275.1 pounds, we’d at least warrant the brisket, if not the ribs.  So let’s take a look at who gets the short loin, that most coveted of primals, filled with glorious T-bones, porterhouses, strip steaks and tenderloins:

Luxembourg?!?!? Oh man, you’ve got to be kidding me.  Luxembourg?  Really?  Their army is like only eight hundred guys!  It’s not even really a country, anyway, but a “Sovereign Grand Duchy.”  A freakin’ duchy!  And they’re beating us in meat consumption!  The hell is going on here?

To distract myself from that harrowing discovery, I turned my attention to some of our neighboring high meat consuming nations.  Spain (261.5 lbs/yr) makes sense, seeing their rightful adoration of everything porcine, and of course New Zealand (313.3 lbs/yr) is a no-brainer, since it’s an island country pretty much built out of sheep.  [I mean that literally, too; you didn't hear it from me, but New Zealand is actually just topsoil and mountains on top of a gigantic bed of six billion live sheep.  Keep it on the down-low, kay?] And sure, French Polynesia (247.4 lbs/yr) and St. Lucia of all places (274.6 lbs/yr) were a bit of a surprise, but they seem exotic and pleasant enough for me to appreciate their underdog status.  But what really got my juices roiling was when I discovered the undisputed victor of the per capita annual meat consumption race: Denmark.

Denmark.  You don’t say.  I never really thought of the Danes being huge carnivores, to tell the truth.  Maybe that’s because all I know about Denmark comes from  Hamlet, a play whose protagonist is so indecisive and angsty, I always kind of figured him to be the progenitor of the modern emo-vegan.  But at 321.7 pounds of dead animals in each of its citizens diets each year — represented here by one pig, one goat, five human skulls, a full rainbow trout, two human hearts, thirteen T-bone steaks and a hot dog — Denmark really is up to some formidable carnivorous consumption.  Bravo, Denmark.  Bravo!

So I decided to take an active interest in these findings and figure out what’s afoot here.  I skimmed through all the basic, boring facts — demography, GDP, geography, geology, exports, whatever they were up to during the Iron Age — to see if I could find out what was going on with all this meat eating.  Then, lo and behold, I discover that the Danes, aside from being global kings and queens of carnivorism, have been officially named the happiest people on the planet.  Granted, it seems that they tend to drink a hell of a lot, as well, and some folks (from chagrined neighboring countries, perhaps?) claim that the reason so many Danish respondents replied so positively on their questionnaires was that they were actually drunk at the time.  And if that’s the case, I say: So what?  Hey, you gotta find happiness somewhere, right?  Food, booze and national health care seems like a good start to me.

Even though I knew that the correlation was tenuous at best, I still couldn’t stop myself from marveling at the fact that the people who eat the most meat per person every year are the happiest men and women on the face of the Earth.  Did they live the longest?  Nope.  Is the cuisine even that spectacular?  Not really.  But they eat a lot, and they drink a lot, and by gum they’re happy about it.  Really happy about it.  Maybe this is all my mind getting wrapped around statistics and variables that probably have nothing to do with each other, I’ll readily admit that; I  do have a fertile imagination.  At the same time, I can’t help but wonder if the Danes have  discovered the true secret to living a full, happy life, and it’s been staring us in the face all along:

Eat meat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.

Speaking of which, what the hell am I doing here, writing?  Who’s up for a burger? No, TWO burgers.  And beer…and whiskey! I  just found the key to happiness!  Who’s with me?