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From the article, Americans eat 55 million pounds of fish sticks per year, so Americans eat on average 1/6 of a pound of fish sticks per year, which is like...
by lacker 6y ago
From the article, Americans eat 55 million pounds of fish sticks per year, so Americans eat on average 1/6 of a pound of fish sticks per year, which is like... on average half of Americans have fish sticks once a year? That hardly sounds like a staple. Compare to, the average American eats 222 pounds of red meat and poultry in a year.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/americans-meat-consumption-set-to-hit-a-record-in-2018/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/americans-meat-consump...
Edit: for another random entertaining comparison, Americans consume about 2 pounds of asparagus each, every year. So about an order of magnitude more than fish sticks. https://www.agmrc.org/commodities-products/vegetables/asparagus#:~:text=It%20is%20an%20early%20season,to%201.9%20pounds%20in%202018 https://www.agmrc.org/commodities-products/vegetables/aspara....
- throwaway5752 6y agoIf you go by the net weight and box dimensions on https://www.walmart.com/ip/Gorton-s-Crunchy-Breaded-Fish-Sticks-18-count/12166675 https://www.walmart.com/ip/Gorton-s-Crunchy-Breaded-Fish-Sti... that's equivalent to a cube 160 feet on each side (packaged volume of annual US fish stick consumption). Not disagreeing with your point, but interesting to visualize the scale of consumption.
- cgriswald 6y agoAs a cube it would sit on roughly half or an American football field. On an everybody-else-football pitch it would cover the whole thing about 32 m deep. It’s both a tremendous amount and also absolutely nothing depending on your point of reference.
- samatman 6y agoThere are around 24,000 high schools in the US. I'll take that number as a proxy for the number of football fields, because, while some high schools don't have one, there are also quite a few which are affiliated with college/universities or municipalities. So that's about six cubic yards per football field, or about enough to fill a couple of standard freezer sections at a supermarket. We can conclude from this that football players don't eat fish sticks very often, or there wouldn't be any left for anyone else!
- thaumasiotes 6y ago> on average half of Americans have fish sticks once a year? It's probably a lot less spread out than that. Some people might like fish sticks. But in my mind, they're something that people give to kids. I haven't had one in decades. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that a large majority of purchased fish sticks are not purchased by someone who intends to eat them.
- qppo 6y agoAverages aren't really good metrics for statistics that don't fall on a bell curve, like with a lot of consumables. Take alchohol [0] consumption, if you look at raw numbers the "average" American drinks quite a lot per day, but it turns out the average American probably doesn't drink much at all. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/09/25/think-you-drink-a-lot-this-chart-will-tell-you/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/09/25/think...
- singron 6y agoIt's like they say: the average American is half male, half female, and has 1.9 children.
- bryanrasmussen 6y agoIt actually varies by year and region with a slightly higher than half percentage being male https://ourworldindata.org/gender-ratio https://ourworldindata.org/gender-ratio
- Simon_says 6y agoNo, not in the US. Most Americans are women. China and India skew the global percentages.
- thaumasiotes 6y agoI think my parent comment's point, that the premise "marketers convinced America to eat fish sticks" hasn't actually been shown, stands. Sure, the average doesn't tell us much, but it does tell us that consumption is really, really low. The more you push consumption levels up to realistic amounts for some people, the more other people you have to admit will never touch a fish stick in their lives.
- mywittyname 6y agoThis is literally the same thought that I had upon reading that statement. I figure, if they come in boxes of roughly a pound each, two for a "family size" bag, and a "regular consumer" would eat it once a week (or 52 times a year). So that leaves 1 million "regular consumers", or 250,000 families who consume it regularly. That's not very many at all. I wouldn't be surprised if scrapple or some other obscure regional food sold more annually than fish sticks. I bet that most fish sticks are sold to fast food joints, and I would not be surprised if most of that consumption occurs during lint.
- plorkyeran 6y agoThe article also says that 64.4 million pounds of fish sticks were sold in in 1955, which means it's dropped quite a bit since then (and that was still under half a pound per person per year).
- bildung 6y agoUS population in 1955 was half the present population, though, so the average US person actually ate fish sticks at least once a year in 1955.
- plorkyeran 6y agoUnder half a pound is adjusting for the lower population. 65m pounds of fish sticks and 156m people.
- craftinator 6y agoIt's completely possible that Americans snort more cocaine than that per year.
- wyattpeak 6y agoI feel fairly confident that the average American doesn't snort a sixth of a pound of cocaine each year.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Garvey 6y agoAt just over 1g a week, it's not out of the realms of possibility, taking into account those who abuse it. I've unfortunately known people who could use that much in a week.
- wyattpeak 6y agoOh for sure I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility that there is someone somewhere who goes through a sixth of a pound per year. In fact I'm sure there are people. What I absolutely do think it's out of the realm of possibility that the average American does. Something like 2% of Americans use cocaine.[1] That figure is probably extremely imprecise, but it barely matters because even if it was 20% it would require that the average user was going through a gram a day. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocaine_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocaine_in_the_United_States
- lucioperca 6y agoGermany consumes 27 fish sticks (2 pounds) per year and person. So I do not know if the American marketers where successful. https://www.br.de/wissen/fisch-fischstaebchen-alaska-seelachs-100.html https://www.br.de/wissen/fisch-fischstaebchen-alaska-seelach...
- verst 6y agoI can confirm I never had fish sticks in the US since moving here for college, but I've had lots of fish sticks during my childhood in Germany.
- andi999 6y agoProbably 100 pounds per year per child...
- deltron3030 6y agoIn Germany, Captain Birdseye (Iglo) TV spots ran on heavy rotation, so much that there was serious backlash when parents bought other brands, (e.g. house labels from supermarkets). My parents tricked me by guarding an older Iglo packaging and then swapping it before putting it into the fridge.
- leokennis 6y agoCan confirm this was also the case in The Netherlands. As a child. fish sticks from "Kapitein Iglo" where a delicious treat. Other fish sticks were not to be consumed.
- tluyben2 6y agoYes, I did know them as ‘fish’ exclusively before I dared to try sliptong, haring and paling; never ate a fish stick after that in my life.
- srtjstjsj 6y agoI saw that as "222/55" = 4 (almost exactly) and then notice the text that shifted the the unit scales significantly. Mixing numbers with non-boilerplate text is confusing.