Consumer attitudes and demand for meat

Abstract

The present state of the food market emphasizes the need to reappraise the analysis of the market for meat. Consumer demand for meat is analyzed in terms of a complex mixture of acceptable levels of leanness, tenderness and flavour and of price and income influences. This analysis is a confusing mixture of incomplete economists' and marketeers' models. As with many disciplines, it is in agriculture and food that we see their first application. Economics is a good example of this. The now conventional models of demand have found wide application and provide a sound foundation for an analysis of the general level and trends in the meat market. Thus, the MLC is able to regularly produce an analysis and forecast for the level of demand for beef, lamb, pigmeat and poultry as commodities and by major subdivision of those commodities (MLC, 1981). This paper does not seek to repeat those results other than to note their revelation of a substantially stable overall consumption level, with steady gains by poultrymeat at the expense of carcass meats, particularly lamb.