McNuggetization in the People’s Republic: Chinese diets are changing and it's helping the climate cause

Those born in the 1970s and 80s have a more triumphant tale to tell. In 1990, the first McDonald’s opened in Shenzhen, across the border from Hong Kong. Around the same time, China became the world’s biggest consumer of meat, buoyed by rising incomes and the efficiency unleashed by allowing private enterprise into farming.

By 2020, the country was consuming half of the world’s pork and a third of all seafood, while Kweichow Moutai—whose ‘baijiu firewater’ is synonymous with conspicuous consumption at banquets—overtook Coca-Cola to become the world’s biggest beverage company.

A new phase is emerging. With spending stagnating and a more health-conscious, atomized younger generation choosing food delivery over banquet halls, diners are trading down.

In market cap terms, Coca-Cola has been back on top all year. Analysts expect Kweichow Moutai’s profit growth to hit its slowest pace since 2015. China’s appetites appear to be changing too. McNuggetization—which America hit in the 80s, when meat ceased to be aspirational and became cheap and trashy instead—is on its way.

After growing for 13 years straight, beef consumption in China will decline this year and again in 2026, according to the US Department of Agriculture. In some cities, sales to restaurants and takeaways have halved. Pork has hit a ‘structural plateau’ too, despite prices falling to around their lowest levels since the 2000s. The egg market is glutted, despite stagnant costs that allow consumers to buy half a dozen for the price of one egg in the US.

“Health-conscious consumers, particularly in urban areas, are incorporating a broader range of proteins, alongside pork, into their diets," the USDA wrote recently.

The winner so far appears to be chicken—but even there, local tastes look more austere. A decade ago, Chinese diners overwhelmingly favoured the yellow-hair, a slow-growing, dark-fleshed breed that was typically picked and slaughtered live at a wet market and eaten the same day.

That taste, and a matching disdain for faster-growing, white-feathered American-style broilers, extends through much of the wider diaspora. Singapore suffered something close to a national crisis in 2022 when neighbouring Malaysia banned exports of poultry amid local shortages. Diners struggled to decide which was worse: Giving up Hainan chicken rice, the city-state’s de facto national dish, or trying to make it with inferior frozen US birds.

Even that redoubt is now falling. Sales of yellow-hair meat comprised just 17.5% of the total last year, while the flock shrank 7.3%. White-feather varieties, which are about half the price, made up almost all of the remainder. Domestic farmers who see cheaper meat as the future have been working hard to develop white-feathered breeding stock to reduce their dependence on imported genetic bloodlines.

The gradual closure of live poultry markets to prevent the spread of bird flu is accelerating the trend: Shanghai this year banned all such trade until 2028. Chinese consumers don’t seem too bothered. If you’re eating your chicken in a wonton soup as takeout, rather than jointed whole as the centerpiece of a family meal, you are likely going to be a lot less picky about its provenance.

This change may not delight gourmands, but it’s likely to be a positive for the environment. Agriculture in China accounts for nearly a billion metric tonnes a year of carbon dioxide-equivalent pollution, similar to the total emissions from Indonesia’s 287 million people.

Costlier meats are the ones with the bigger carbon footprints. As Chinese diners trade down from carbon-intensive beef to low-emitting chicken, we’re providing more grams of protein for each tonne of greenhouse gases. Even the shift in chicken breeds helps: Yellow-hair broilers take twice as long to reach slaughter weights, requiring twice as much feed and twice as much fertilizer to grow it.

We’re not going to solve the problem of global warming through dietary changes—especially in places like China, where the relative novelty of red meat makes beef far less of a staple than in the West. Still, small moves toward a less lavish style of dining can collectively help reduce the burden of our lifestyles on the planet.

McNuggetization happens because people are short of cash, rather than conscience-stricken about climate change. But the effect on the atmosphere is identical. ©Bloomberg

The author is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering climate change and energy.