Country of beef and steaks, or not?

Thinking of Australia, you will certainly picture things like sun, beach, heat or koala, kangaroo, crocodile, snake, shark, sheep and … beef. If you move away from the coasts and the big cities, you will quickly notice the huge pastures where very large quantities of cattle graze (although there is often no grass left now due to the drought).

Covering more than 200 million hectares, the beef industry is the largest agricultural sector in Australia. And Australia is the third largest exporter of beef in the world after Brazil and India. The Australian beef industry is heavily dependent on export markets. Over 60% of Australian beef production is exported, mainly to Japan, the US and South Korea. From January to June 2018, a total of 487,215 cattle were sold abroad. Cattle breeding also is the largest agricultural sector of all.

Thus, you get both at butchers and in supermarkets very good beef for very reasonable money (in comparison to pork in Germany). And some of these kinds of steaks, that are rarely seen in Europe …

Consequently, regarding meat, one would think that beef should be part of the standard diet of the Australians and certainly dominate the menus and displays of supermarkets.

Chicken went ahead of beef

That was still true until about 15 years ago, but since then the chicken gradually got the upper hand and has relegated the cattle to the 3rd place.

The most well-known “representative” of the new chicken generation is the Chicken Parmigiana, also “parmy”, “parmi” or “parma”. You cannot escape the “Parmy”. It is on the menu of almost all pubs/taverns and of a lot of other restaurants and cafés, usually next to the “traditional” chicken schnitzel. It is remarkable that in spite of the big cattle production, one rarely gets a schnitzel made of veal any more (a real Wiener Schnitzel).

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Furthermore, in the vast majority of taverns, there are now more dishes with chicken than beef / veal. Even at many butchers, the poultry displays are larger than the beef / veal ones.

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Australia, the world’s No. 4 in chicken consumption

In Australia, more than twice as many chickens per head (48.47 kg) of population are consumed than the average of the European Union (21.95 kg). This puts Australia in 4th place among the top 10 chicken consuming countries in the world. The per capita consumption of beef and veal in Australia, however, is only about 26 kg.

Consequently, I no longer order chickens at taverns, restaurants and cafés since it is still offered at almost every visit or dinner invitation with friends and relatives. And at some point it will be enough.

I’m chicking out now …