(FORTUNE Magazine) – Now towering over America: more meat than ever before. Joe Leathers, merchandising director for the National Pork Producers Council, an industry trade group, paints the landscape: "We are heading for record supplies, not just in pork but in beef and poultry. This is the biggest mountain of meat we have ever had to sell." Beef, pork, and poultry producers will offer up a record 70 billion pounds of flesh this year. That translates into more than 200 pounds on every person's plate in 1994. One reason for the abundance: Ranchers punched out herds of cattle in the late Eighties and early Nineties, buoyed by outstanding profits. Many of those cattle are hitting the market now, and thanks to sharpened breeding techniques, they are less fatty and yet heavier than ever. Luckily, the nation's appetite for flesh is growing along with the meat supply. Encouraged by desperate meatmongers, the American carnivore, a species once deemed endangered, is gorging itself on lean cuts of beef and new products like pork burgers. Notes Jens Knutson, an economist for the American Meat Institute: "We consume everything we produce." In October, sale prices on beef were chopped to the lowest levels since 1989. Helped by increased competition with other slabs of meat, beef prices will remain in the trough into next year. Mmmm . . .