The Great American Food Swap

We export beef, import beef, and send fish to China just to buy it back. Understanding the strange arithmetic of global agriculture.

It seems like the story should be simple. We grow and eat what we can, export what we don’t need, and import the rest.

Yet outside of trade war headlines, most of us are removed from the ins and outs of the dynamic mix of climate, culture, economics, and international intrigue that is our agricultural trade system.

To appreciate just how complex that system is, it’s worth considering a few questions that seem simple but are actually very difficult to answer, and for very different reasons.

1. What are we exporting the most of?

At first glance it seems like the answer should be soybeans. As the below chart shows, in 2024, soybean exports were worth $24.5 billion, making them almost twice as valuable as the second-place commodity, corn, at $13.7 billion.

Soybeans were the United States’ most valuable agricultural export in 2024

Top five US agricultural food exports in nominal billions of US dollars, by year, since 2000

Source: Global Agricultural Trade System (GATS)

We’ve spoken only about the value of soybeans, however. The weight of US soybeans exported in 2024 was 52.21 metric tons, compared with 61.72 metric tons of corn exported in the same year. So by the kind of accounting airlines do about luggage, the US exported more weight of corn than of soybeans.

Why measure this stuff in dollars instead of weight, then?

For one, the changing value of an agricultural product is a source of a great deal of information about that product. Overall production of soybeans in the US has been on a relatively steady increase, but the global price over the last quarter century has been volatile, for reasons as varied as droughts, aphid infestations, changing demand from China, port congestion in Brazil, the Great Recession, and the changing prices of other crops like corn and wheat.

This brings us to the second reason it’s helpful to focus on value — comparability. Determining by weight how many cargo ships of soybeans we are sending out compared with, say, beef requires a series of strange calculations that are the agricultural-trade equivalent of “Who would win in a fight?” How many soybeans would it take to reach the weight of one cow?

While the rough estimate is around 4 million, depending on the soybeans and the cow, a complete answer would require doing things like taking into consideration the fact that soybeans grow smaller late in the season, as well as introducing the troubling phrase “hot carcass weight” (“the weight of the unchilled beef carcass in pounds after the head, hide and internal organs have been removed”) into your vocabulary to account for the fact that not all of the cow ends up as meat.

The point is, when it comes to international trade, because we are literally comparing apples to oranges to cows, monetary value in the US is the clearest metric we have. (International agricultural prices also tend not to be adjusted for inflation, in part because inflation is different in different countries and there’s no international measure of it.)

2. What are we supposed to do with all these soybeans?

The first thing to know about US soybean production is that soybean farmers are, as one put it, “not doing well.” The US is currently the second-largest producer of soybeans, providing an estimated 28% of the global supply, led by Brazil’s 40%.

For decades, the US was the top global exporter of soybeans, but after briefly overtaking the US in 2013, Brazil reclaimed the top spot in 2018 and has stayed there since, mainly because of the US trade wars with China, the top global soybean importer (by a lot), during President Trump’s first and second terms. This has coincided with increasing production and efficiency in Brazil, making it the perfect replacement supplier for China’s growing demand. Other challenges facing American soybean growers include rising costs and labor shortages, all of which are exacerbated by the fact that we’re dealing with a perishable product.

The other thing to know about American-grown soybeans is that we aren’t eating most of them. About 52% of US soybean production in 2024 was exported, and roughly 70% of the soybeans that stay here are used for livestock feed. The same is true of our second-place export, corn, of which we are the top global producer. We export between 10% and 20% of our corn, but despite its status as a classic summer barbecue side dish, the non-exported vast majority is also not eaten by us but instead used for animal feed and biofuels.

3. Where’s the beef… from?

We can also see in the chart above that beef is our third most valuable export. Overall, the US is the world’s biggest producer of beef, as well as a top consumer and top global exporter of it. It sounds like the story is simple: we make a lot of it, we eat a lot of it, and then we ship out the rest. But — as my new favorite news source, the National Beef Wire, reports — we are also the world’s second-largest importer of beef.

How did we get here? Are we at the nexus of the universe of the beef industry?

The story has many moving parts, but a big one is taste. While beef is indeed what’s for dinner in a lot of American households, our penchant for hamburgers means a high demand for ground beef, which can be made from a wider variety of qualities of meat. Thus, according to my new second-favorite news source, Beef magazine, it’s cheaper to import lean trimmings from abroad to mix into burgers and then save our higher-quality cuts for steaks and exports. Americans also tend not to be terribly into parts of cows like hearts and intestines, so we export those, too (and for a pretty penny!).

By the way, if you’re wondering who eats all this beef, about 70% of Americans eat beef at least once per week. But a recent study estimates that only 12% of the American population might be driving around half of our national beef consumption, with men as well as older people much more likely to be these disproportionately high consumers. (At this point I should note that I am vegan and have not had beef since before Bill Clinton was elected president, and thus want you all to know that my commitment to journalistic excellence outweighed my absolute squeamishness when putting together this section.)

And just to round out our top five agricultural exports with the remaining two products: the story with pork (a category that also includes “pork products” like hot dogs) is roughly similar to that of beef (and beef products). And the tree nuts one, mercifully, is relatively simple from a trade dynamics perspective: we make, eat, and export a lot of almonds and pistachios. It’s more complicated from an environmental perspective in that growing almonds requires massive amounts of water, which has sparked debates about production versus sustainability.

4. Why are we importing so much seafood?

Turning to imports, we can see in the chart below that our two most valuable ones are alcohol and seafood. They come in quite a bit ahead of the doctor’s order of fresh fruit, our national sweet- and carbohydrate-tooth demand for baked goods, as well as processed fruit and vegetables (things like applesauce, canned peaches, and other staples of The Road).

Drinks and fish for everyone!

Top five US agricultural food imports in nominal billions of US dollars, by year, since 2000

Source: Global Agricultural Trade System (GATS)

Pour yourself a dry martini and shuck some oysters, because there is much to unpack in the world of American seafood imports. One of the overall most curious features of the American agricultural trade system is that the US catches all kinds of high quality fish in the wild, exports a lot of them, and then imports a whole bunch of not-so-high-end and often farmed fish.

Sometimes we even take our freshly caught, say, Alaskan salmon, freeze it, and ship it to China for processing — fileting, boning, refreezing — only to import it back into the US with a “Made in China” label on it.

Why? According to Paul Greenberg, author of books on the seafood industry and coiner of the phrase “the great American fish swap,” a lot of it has to do with costs: labor in China is so much cheaper than labor in the US that it’s actually less expensive to have fish shipped to and from China than to have it processed by American workers.

Changes in American consumer tastes have also played a role; for example, researchers have documented decades-long shifts in preferences for wild-caught versus farmed fish. Others point to the fact that Americans tend to consume milder fish and not enough fish per dietary guidelines as evidence that we simply don’t have a desire to eat our more flavorful fresh catches.

Even technological innovation abroad affects what we eat. For example, shrimp was considered a rare luxury product until a scholar in Japan discovered how to induce shrimp spawning in captivity during his doctoral research in 1933. Over the next few decades, he refined and expanded his system, eventually earning the enviable moniker of “the father of shrimp farming.” (The next time you’re at a party with shrimp cocktails, be sure to toast Dr. Motosaku Fujinaga!)

5. Good heavens, how am I going to make sense of all of this?

This has been a lot, I know. Luckily, you are in the hands of a tremendous graphic designer (me), and I have made you a picture summarizing some of the key trends we discussed in this article.

Do me a personal favor and enjoy this chart!

One way to categorize many of the agricultural products discussed in this article

Source: Oh no, it’s my brain again!

The way to think about the chart is that it’s a 2x2 matrix that is also loosely a continuum. All products marked with an asterisk are those that, much like a Facebook relationship status in 2008, have an import/export status of “It’s complicated.” So while there are four quadrants, a number of commodities fall into more than one square. Beef, for example, is something we both make and eat, but we also export a lot and import a lot. And while we do keep a lot of our own corn, we give most of it to livestock, so the “you” in the upper left quadrant is both “other countries” and “animals.”

Seafood is our crowned champion of complexity, occupying all four categories at once depending on what kinds of fish we are considering — and even then there are caveats. As discussed, most of our salmon is exported, but some comes back after processing. While most shrimp consumed in the US is imported, we do actually harvest and export some of our own as well. And even though we produce and eat the vast majority of a particular domestic species of channel catfish, we also import other species.

Finally, a few words about the other items in the bottom half of the matrix. On the right, our classic imports — things we don’t make but get from other countries — include chocolate, coffee, cashews, cheese, and even many products that don’t start with the letter “c,” like French wines and many spices.

The lower left quadrant is for the things you didn’t know existed until you went to another country and learned about them. (I recently went to Brazil and learned about pitanga and jabuticaba, and while I had heard of it, I’d never before tried cashew fruit — it’s great! If anyone reading this has ever had the fermented Swedish apparent delicacy of surströmming, please tell the rest of us what it’s like.)

Sometimes we can spot some of these items in our grocery stores or specialty markets, but most of the time they’re too perishable to bother shipping or they’re prohibited due to a risk of importing pests or other issues. That said, in some cases, including that of mangosteen, there have been policy shifts that allow them in the US under very strict conditions.

Some final, difficult considerations

It’s hard to think about agricultural imports and exports without thinking about climate change. While most of the discussion above was focused on consumption patterns and prices, every single one of these products raises questions about what’s happening to our planet. What does it mean for the environment that most of our farmland is used for crops that are in turn used for livestock feed? How do we think about the sustainability and ethics of fish farming versus catching fish in the wild? Surely it can’t be good for the environment that we’re shipping all these meats and fish around the world rather than consuming them locally, right?

Even within the limited scope of this article, though, there is some interesting room for change and perhaps improvement. For one, increasing awareness of the fact that we’re somehow both importers and exporters of beef and fish could go a long way toward changing consumption patterns. Second, the finding that 12% of Americans eat half of the beef consumed in the US could offer a path to more effective, targeted messaging around reducing beef consumption. Finally, getting more clarity about the nuances and complexities of the global food system could help us make sure we’re pursuing thoughtful policies on trade and the environment, as well as effectively tracking the outcomes of those policies.

And while there’s mixed evidence that eating locally helps the environment — the high-level story is that transportation distance matters but you also need to take into account production methods in order to evaluate the sustainability of produce choices — there are definite taste benefits to eating locally and in season. There really is nothing like a peak-harvest Mackinaw peach.