I found this graph someone posted on Facebook interesting. Looks like much of the average American food consumption is food I don't even eat: dairy products, cheese, eggs, fish, poultry, red meat and corn syrup. I'm also older, taller, and thinner than the average female, so I guess I don't quite eat 1996.3 lbs of food each year, either.
(I like how, by eliminating half that circle, I'm able to eat much more than my fair share of all the other stuff, without feeling the least bit deprived. More cookies for me!)
What surprised me is how many pounds of vegetables Americans eat. With all the talk about the SAD diet, I'd have thought it would be lower, but pound for pound, it's more than meat of any kind. (Maybe they eat a lot of butternut squash and potatoes.) Sadly, though, Americans eat more sugar than wheat flour—since many sweet products are baked goods, it's hard to imagine that.
And what the heck are "beverage milks"? Whatever it is, Americans drink about 4 times as much of them as coffee. And who lied when they reported they only ate 23 lbs of pizza a year? Certainly this survey did not include college students, or, in my experience, campaign workers.
If anyone can point me to a similar chart showing UK food consumption, I'd be interested to see the difference. It'd be great to see how much yeast extract the average Brit eats.