B is for Beef (and Lamb)

Fellow Lawrentian Gabrielle Prouty Stratton moved to Australia one day, and I finally got around to asking her about life in the Southern Hemisphere.

When Hannah first asked me to write something about my food experiences in Australia, the first thing that came to mind was meat. Like Americans, Australians consume a lot of meat and produce a lot of it too, leaning toward beef and lamb in particular. In my current location in the city of Armidale, New South Wales, one doesn't even need to drive outside of town to see evidence to this fact, as there are both sheep and cattle within the city limits. However, the most startling difference between the two countries is that most of that beef and lamb here is grass-fed and pasture raised.

While there is plenty of local lamb being eaten in New South Wales,
 this is wool country and the sheep here are primarily Merinos.
Photo credit: Gabrielle Stratton,

Even after living in Australia for almost a year, I am still astounded by the size of this country and how few people inhabit it. To speak broadly, the population density of the U.S. is 88.6 people per square mile, where Australia is a measly 7.3 per square mile (for comparison, think Montana—6.9 per square mile). Therefore, there's an awful lot of open land for sheep and cattle to graze. Take the largest cattle ranch in South Australia, which is roughly the size of New Hampshire. Or that there are grazing herds in the Northern Territories and Queensland that number in the hundreds of thousands. Or the fact that 860 cattle could disappear from Cape York without a trace. (That was only three years ago.)


A huge number of Australian farms are devoted to the production of cattle and sheep—88%, according to figures from Meat & Livestock Australia, with a majority focused on cattle (55% of Australian farms raise cattle and 33% raise sheep). These farms amount for approximately half of the entire Australian landmass. If that doesn't seem like a lot, let me also say that only about 60% of Australia is defined as arable. (As to the remaining, forests account for 19% and deserts come in shortly behind at 18%.)

New England, NSW grassland. Photo credit: Gabrielle Stratton.

Most of these sheep and cattle are free to roam and graze before their final trip to the abattoir. Australia, of course, does not produce as much beef as the U.S.—or Brazil, or China, or Argentina, or India, for that matter—but the difference lies in the fact that 70% of Australian beef is pasture-raised. The enormous feedlots of the U.S. simply do not exist here. In fact, much of the grass-fed beef you find in your supermarket in the U.S. might have come from Australia.

As to be expected from a wealthy, developed country, Australians eat a lot of meat. Australians consume more beef and lamb than Americans, about seven pounds more beef (per person, per year) and twenty pounds of lamb (though I won't make any judgments on overall meat consumption and will leave poultry, pork and seafood out of this). For an American walking into an Australian restaurant, the abundance of lamb on the menu might be surprising, considering how it is often seen more as a specialty dish in the U.S. (There are a handful of other things that might surprise you as well, but alas, I fear this is another topic for another time.)

Because of the low population of this country, most of the meat produced is exported. I hate to bore you with more statistics, but I find it extremely fascinating, so humor me a bit. Looking at figures from 2013-14, 70% of Australian beef is exported to other countries (and this figure does not include live cattle exports, the monetary value of which is roughly 15% of the total of combined beef, veal, and live exports). Australia exports 57% of its lamb and 96% of its mutton. Australians do not eat mutton in large quantities—actually, they eat just about as much mutton as Americans eat lamb.

So, despite the fact that I myself eat little meat, the consumption and production of meat is very much a prominent part of Australian life and is the first thing I think of when asked about Australian food and food culture, followed by Vegemite.

What a teaser! Don't worry, there's more on the way. In the meantime, follow Gabrielle's adventures at life, upside down.