Australians devoured 90.21 kilograms of meat per person in 2014, 170 grams more per person than the Americans, according to the latest figures from the Organisation of Economic Development and Co-operation and UN Food and Agriculture Organisation. As the chart above shows, our return to the top ranking is mostly due to a decade-long decline in American meat consumption. By contrast, Australia's meat consumption has been creeping upwards over the past two decades, mostly driven by an increased appetite for chicken and pork. While red meat has traditionally taken pride of place at the centre of the Aussie dinner table, we're now eating half as much lamb as in the 1980s and two-thirds the amount of beef, but nearly 2.5 times as much chicken and twice as much pork. (Our shifting preferences can be traced to a number of economic, cultural and environmental factors.)

Different patterns of meat consumption around the world tell a story of rich and poor. Meat consumption tends to rise as income rises, until it reaches a saturation point – where average incomes keep rising but people decide they just can't eat any more meat. This scatterplot, comparing meat consumption and gross national income, suggests the saturation point for most countries falls somewhere between 70 and 90 kg of meat per person. (The consumption rates shown here are higher because they are calculated from import and production figures.) Note how far above the curve Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand and the US lie. That's how much these countries love their meat. (Hat tip to Nomura's Rob Subbaraman for the chart, published here by Business Insider.) Cultural preferences produce some notable exceptions to the "mo money mo meat" pattern, such as India, where religious preferences mean up to 30-40 per cent of the population are vegetarians; and Malaysia and China, where meat consumption is far higher than would be expected from each country's income.

Worldwide, chicken is now the world's favourite meat by a slim margin, having surpassed pork in 2007 – a trend mostly driven by meat preferences among the wealthy OECD nations. Chicken has been the preferred meat among OECD countries since 2000. Worldwide consumption of chicken was 13.2kg per person in 2014; pork was 12.6kg. As for which countries might be particularly concerned by the World Health Organisation's latest announcement that bacon, sausage and other processed meats cause cancer, the figures don't include a breakdown for bacon or processed meat. However, China and Vietnam – two of the world's fastest-rising meat-eating nations – ate the most pork of any nation in 2014, with the Chinese surpassing the Europeans to claim the No. 1 ranking only recently, in 2013.