Goat meat is the most widely consumed meat in the world, per capita.
Though we don’t eat it a great deal here in the west, it’s nonetheless one of the most popular meats in the world.
It’s natural to wonder, then, why you don’t seem to be able to buy it in stores here in the U.S.
Goat meat just isn’t popular enough to be sold in stores, then.
There may be a degree of social stigma around the meat, as there is with horse meat, with it being seen as cheap meat and less nutritious than lamb, sheep, or cow.
But let’s investigate further.
Why is goat meat not popular in the US?
It’s a more complex question than you might think, steeped in history and culture.
Since the industrial revolution, people have been more and more living in cities, and growing and raising less food for themselves.
Where goats may have been very popular for subsistence farmers of the past, they were less valuable on large-scale farms for a variety of reasons.
For one thing, goats require large pastures to roam for a variety of forage to eat.
Sheep and cows, on the other hand, are quite content to eat mostly grass in a simple grassy pasture.
This makes goats a lot more difficult to rear.
They need more space and more high-quality forage.
Thus, realizing this, farmers have for centuries simply been able to make a more reliable profit on other kinds of livestock.
As commercially available goat meat became less and less common, the population essentially fell out of touch with eating it.
Another part of the reason for this, especially in the last half a century or so, is that goat meat began to be associated with poverty.
Goat meat was something cheaply eaten during the Great Depression, or by the poorest farmers of third world countries.
Naturally, nothing about this means anything in relation to the actual healthiness of goat meat—we are just talking about perception.
As the middle class grew, fewer and fewer people were willing to eat things that were thought of as food for the poor.
Today, there is little to no demand for goat meat—and thus little supply.
In that way, it’s almost a self-fulfilling prophecy!
Is goat meat not healthy?
There is a reason goat is the single most consumed kind of meat in the world—it’s highly nutritious and very healthy.
This, again, is an issue with perception in the US.
Because it is still, however abstractly, associated with poverty, the perception also becomes that it is not properly nutritious.
In fact, goat meat has less fat and cholesterol than typical beef, pork, or chicken.
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In a 120-calorie serving of goat meat, there are around 20-22 grams of protein.
This is around the same that you would get in other meats like pork or beef, but with fewer calories and less saturated fats.
Goat meat also has a lot more iron than most other meats.
It’s even easier to digest than beef or chicken because the molecular structure is very different.
So, goat meat is certainly very healthy, compared with other meats.
As red meats go, it is in fact one of the healthiest options, and again, there is a reason it is consumed in such vast quantities across the world.
But is it legal in the US?
Is goat meat legal in the US?
You may have heard that it is actually illegal to butcher horses for their meat in the US, and this is true.
There are no health and safety provisions for abattoirs and meat packing plants for handling horse meat, so it is not legal to produce horse meat in the US.
The same is not true of goats, though.
The fact is that goat meat is becoming more and more popular, particularly in artisanal and gourmet cooking.
It is still considered an exotic meat here, simply by virtue of the fact it is not widely eaten.
But it is perfectly legal, it just isn’t eaten very much—so who does eat it?
Who eats the most goat meat?
Per capita, the country which consumes the most goat meat in the world is Sudan.
Per capita, the Sudanese consume around 8.6 pounds of goat per year.
China also consumes a huge amount of goat meat—of the roughly 450 million goats in the world, China accounts for about 170 million of them.
But goat is also widely eaten across the Caribbean, islands in the South Pacific, all over Asia, Africa, and pretty much the entire global south.
If anything, the US and the west in general are the global outliers for not eating meat!
There are many complex reasons for why any particular food becomes popular in a particular place.
Goat meat in the US is certainly a strange one, given that there is no shortage of goats in the US.
However, it just comes down to a combined issue of the popularity of the meat and the fact that goats are relatively difficult to rear, compared with other animals like sheep and cattle.