HumanConsumption.Live – Real-Time Global Animal Consumption Stats
by speckx on 1/30/2026, 3:04:36 PM
https://www.humanconsumption.live/
Comments
by: doodlebugging
I thought it was a page about recipes for cannibals or tuberculosis tracking from the name. Luckily the title helped clarify the misleading website name.<p>Y'all some hungry mofos. That counter zipped thru 13 million poor tasty, little critters while I was on that page. The cattle numbers seemed low relative to others. Maybe because they are larger and each feeds more individuals.<p>What about normal game animals like deer, squirrel, wild turkey, rabbit, dove, quail, pigeon, etc? I think this site only gives a glimpse of the true scope of animal deliciousness.<p>I also disagree with the numbers since most look they are wild-ass guesses intended to inflate or mislead so as to cause those of us who consume all this delicious meat to switch to more sensitive plants, insects, or algae, or fungi.<p>Imagine the numbers you'd have to report if you were accurately reporting seed consumption of typical grains, legumes, leafy vegetables, herbs (which are delicious with meats), and spices and all the other things that vegetarians or vegans profess such deep attractions to that they can ignore all the destruction wrought by the agricultural practices relevant to their foodstocks. Some of the agricultural lands being tallied are used for growing crops like soybeans for consumption as pseudo-meat by vegans who couldn't be morally outraged enough about habitat loss for their beany things to worry about their own destructive impact on mother earth.<p>What happens to the collective consciousness of a fungal colony when someone comes along and rips off a few warty things for their supper? Do you think that the fungus stores a memory of the event and the participants so that once they finally hit the dirt that memory can pass along the subterranean chain so that the fungus can move in return the favor?
1/30/2026, 6:41:53 PM
by: CurrentB
I went vegan six months ago after being exposed to numbers like this and thinking about it a bit. In particular, imagining extending the empathy I felt for my pets to all these other unseen animals that really aren't much different. I thought I'd try it for a week to see how hard it was. It was so easy that I never looked back. These numbers all could be pretty close to zero and we humans would still thrive just as much as we are now, but causing much less suffering to other beings.
1/30/2026, 4:53:45 PM
by: blell
I understand this kind of people is allergic to “per capita”, but really, showing a list of consumption by region when the regions are of such different sizes is next to worthless.
1/30/2026, 4:59:04 PM
by: xnx
I don't consume animal products, but -while well intentioned- I'm not sure a dashboard with these types of huge numbers does much as an advocacy tool.<p>People are ill equipped to put such large numbers in context, let alone ~40 of them.<p>Like a slide deck, better to limit to one number and one message per page(/screen). Otherwise, it's just a data dump.
1/30/2026, 5:05:46 PM
by: fooker
If these numbers seem extraordinarily high to you, try and estimate the scale of deforestation it would take to replace all this food with grains and vegetables.<p>(Hint: about 5-10x the available fertile land on earth)
1/30/2026, 6:54:34 PM
by: davidmurdoch
Something interesting to see is a version of if this that displayed a % of total animals instead of absolutes.
1/30/2026, 5:50:38 PM
by: seanwilson
There's also the significant cost to climate change because growing crops to feed to animals instead of eating crops directly loses the majority of calories, but it gets ignored because doing something about it is going to be unpopular:<p><a href="https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture" rel="nofollow">https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture</a><p>> More than three-quarters of global agricultural land is used for livestock, despite meat and dairy making up a much smaller share of the world's protein and calories.<p>> Despite the vast land used for livestock animals, they contribute quite a small share of the global calorie and protein supply. Meat, dairy, and farmed fish provide just 17% of the world’s calories and 38% of its protein.<p><a href="https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets" rel="nofollow">https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets</a><p>> Livestock are fed from two sources – lands on which the animals graze and land on which feeding crops, such as soy and cereals, are grown. How much would our agricultural land use decline if the world adopted a plant-based diet?<p>> Research suggests that if everyone shifted to a plant-based diet, we would reduce global land use for agriculture by 75%.
1/30/2026, 5:33:19 PM
by: Cu3PO42
I personally find the "animals killed since you opened this page" number to be the most unsettling. YTD numbers are so large, I find them hard to process.<p>If you choose to eat meat, please be aware of the conditions most of these animals exist in and how they die. I'll spare you more numbers, because they don't do the cruel reality justice anyway. Instead, I'll leave you with some video material: <a href="https://animalequality.org/blog/factory-farming-facts/" rel="nofollow">https://animalequality.org/blog/factory-farming-facts/</a>
1/30/2026, 5:59:18 PM
by: schlap
Hell yeah, live leaderboard of humans.<p>Add a K/D Ratio next plz
1/30/2026, 5:56:30 PM
by: lastwalz
Oh fuck it you dorks. More statistics mostly vegans and weirdos have an interest in.
1/30/2026, 7:14:00 PM
by: big-chungus4
Wait so when I ate the steak, it actually went up, how did it know?
1/30/2026, 5:16:17 PM
by: slifin
I am going to continue eating meat and plants but that's because the choice between eating plants or meat misses the point<p>The issue here is the industrialisation of the land and the shortcuts that farmers are doing that essentially kill the land, animals and plants in a way that is unmaintainable<p>The way this should work is animals should be herded on to land to eat and poo, once the grasses are nearly eaten the animals should be rotated on to other fields, the new grass regrows in this fresh environment because it has no competitor and plenty of fertiliser this process kills weeds and rejuvenates soil ready for planting<p>This mimics the nomadic lives that early humans would have led, following their herds of animals to fresh new pastures<p>Then the farmers worked out they didn't need animals to do this process they could just plow their fields and then that gets rid of the weeds, not quite as good as animals doing it in terms of soil health but effective and quick<p>Then the farmers were sold weed killers which meant they didn't need to plow their field, they just needed to buy GMO glyphosate resistant seeds and flood their fields with glyphosate, some types of crops are even killed close to harvest with glyphosate so it'll be in your food at high rates for certain crops<p>The problem with this approach is glyphosate is assumed safe because its mechanism for killing weeds is based on a system we don't directly have as humans, but our gut bacteria do, it also competes with glycine in our bodies used to create proteins, I wouldn't want to drink glyphosate from the bottle but it's being added to my food so effectively I do that<p>It also degrades the soil quality into dust, instead of being full of earth worms which would normally feed the birds, the local wildlife etc<p>So these mono culture fields are just turning huge swathe of land into sterile dust bowls that exacerbate climate change<p>Then these crops are either sold directly to me as a plant eater or given to the animals to make them bulk up and sick<p>As someone who eats a lot of meat I want my animals to be grass fed (or their natural diet) I don't want them to have to take antibiotics because the farmer needed to bulk them up with cheap glyphosate laced mono culture grains and cereals to get more profit out of the animal<p>So if you are vegan you cannot just wipe your hands of this problem because you're still contributing by eating these mono crops - What we really need from consumers is for them to care how their plants and animals are raised and not accept glyphosate or other weed killers in their supply chains<p>Animals should be pasture raised from a moral point of view but also a health and climate point of view
1/30/2026, 6:34:47 PM