> There are ~30M cattle in the US at any given time
That number is the count of full grown cattle, 31M. When you include calves, it's 98M total in the US. It isn't easy to realize just how nauseating that truly is.
There's roughly 330M people in the US. One cow will feed 2300 people 3oz of beef, which is the most meat one may eat in a sitting and still be considered healthy (though I personally disagree, no amount of red meat is healthy IMO). 360M / 31M comes out to around 10 people per cow, which will feed them once a day 3oz for 230 days. So the US has enough beef to serve every man, woman and child a a 3oz steak serving once every 38 hours, all year long.
Of course, nothing close to this amount is actually consumed, and at least 23% of it is entirely wasted in production, 7.1M cattle annually are effectively turned into garbage before product can hit store shelves.
I apologize in advance for my bad math. Please adujust and correct if any have the inclination. Thank you.
My Google results say 94.4M cows in the US. Assume a quarter of those are milk cows, leaving 70.8M beef cattle. Assume a ratio of 1:1 cows to calves, leaving 35.4M adult cows for slaughter. 1000lbs. of cow will will average around 430 pounds of retail cuts. So, with 1/4 lb. servings, one cow will feed 1720 people. Contrary to beef sellers' belief that eating red meat every day is good, one should not consume more than 3 portions of beef a week if one hopes to live to old age. Population of US is 328.2M people, assuming they all eat precisely maximum amount of beef a week to remain healthy, that is about 51.2B servings (let's say 1.4 lb. each serving) of beef a year consumed, which is about 7.4M cows per year. There appears to be a needless surplus of 28M head of cattle.
So many things bother me about the cattle industry. The horror of it, the cruelty, the waste, the destruction of wild habitat, the environmental impact, the greed, and the bullshit idea that we as a society need to do anything to preserve the way of life for rich ranchers (such as the Bundy's, et al).
> that's about 0.6lbs of meat every day for every man, woman and child.
That doesn't sound all that high at all. I probably would've guessed slightly lower at less than 0.5lbs/person, but knowing the average American diet that seems well within reason. If I ate a 1/4 lb burger twice a day (i.e. for lunch and dinner) or a 1/2 lb burger once a day (i.e. just for lunch or dinner), that'd be pretty close on beef alone.
>(Just 12% of people in the US account for half of all beef consumed in the US.)
There are similar statistics for alcohol consumption/purchases, which makes it difficult to affect change personally and the corporations aren't likely to try to sell less to their highest volume customers...
Where the hell did you get this number from? I buy all my beef from a farmer who's a friend of a friend. A year's supply is purchased all at once, so I have a pretty good idea of how much of it we eat. My family of four goes through less than 250 lbs (about 110kg) of beef in a year, yet your statistic is that we should be eating roughly half a ton of it per year?
If you're going to make shit up, at least make it sound reasonable.
That's true, but you certainly can't feed 7 billion people on an all-beef diet from locally grown, grass-fed beef.
With some simple math, assuming people could eat 500g of meat a day, each person would eat an entire adult cow every ~3 years. So you would need a population of ~2.5 billion cows every year to support this - and that's assuming that there is no waste, that we could consume the entire weight of an adult cow (including bones), and that 500g of meat per day is enough.
> "a finding that may help consumer groups and government agencies craft educational messaging around the negative health and environmental impacts of beef consumption."
One problem right here. This pernicious narrative that eating beef/meat is bad in absolute terms.
There is no negative impact of eating beef. The negative impact always comes from excess. When it comes to human impact on the environment this is compounded by the excessive population on this planet.
14% of US beef is exported, but if the beef industry disappeared overnight, no one would starve as a result, and neither would the ~70M dogs in the US, which are omnivores btw. And typically slaughter occurs between 12 and 22 months, so it's more accurate to snark "it's not like you're all eating >2 year old cows."
> Steak and other "whole" cuts are harder, obviously. But 40-45% of beef consumed in the US is ground beef[1], so cutting that by even half would get us half way there.
Frustratingly it wouldn't, because the ground beef being consumed is largely an afterproduct of cows raised for those larger cuts. Burgers are cheap not because beef is cheap (it's not) but because they're being subsidized by brisket roasts and tenderloins cut from the same animal (there's surely some dairy cows in the mix too, but I'm led to believe that most older dairy animals get slaughtered for non-grocery products like animal feed).
We need to reduce steak/bbq consumption primarily, doing so will make burgers more expensive and reduce their consumption as a side effect.
There are actually 8.1 billion humans. Say that everyone wants beef for dinner, .5 lb / person, rounding down to 3 lbs weekly, rounding down to 150 lbs per year. That is 1.2 trillion pounds of beef per year. The real number is much lower due to age demographics, dietary choices, and poverty (about 60 lbs per person, per year in just the US) but let's keep it simple;, "If everyone in the world wanted 3 lbs of grass fed beef a week, how would that work out?"
400 lbs of meat per head of cattle is 3,000,000,000 cows. 5 acres per head of pure grass fed, double number of animals because of average slaugher at 2 years, and that is 30 billion acres devoted to grazing. For context 125 million acres are utilized for cattle (feed and grazing) in the US. Globally that is 3 times more than is used for all agriculture, globally. This is ignoring dairy.
So this is not very tricky. It is wildly unrealistic for grass fed beef to be anything but an extreme luxury food without large numbers of people starving.
> Consumption of red meat is at an all time high and is growing every year.
I was curious to see if this was actually the case, but the data doesn't really seem to support this claim. Meat consumption overall appears to have remained relatively stable over the past few years, but it's mostly been an increase in poultry intake that's made up for a simultaneous decline in red meat consumption.
The true cost of beef is staggering. It is, by far, one of our most selfish indulgences the rich have. It's sad that our economic model doesn't adequately capture this.
A lot of numbers get thrown around, but the amount of grain and water you need for 1 pound of beef is enough to feed something like 25 people. Then there's the environmental impact (land, pollution, ....). The more I travel the world, the harder it is for me to eat beef.
That number is the count of full grown cattle, 31M. When you include calves, it's 98M total in the US. It isn't easy to realize just how nauseating that truly is.
There's roughly 330M people in the US. One cow will feed 2300 people 3oz of beef, which is the most meat one may eat in a sitting and still be considered healthy (though I personally disagree, no amount of red meat is healthy IMO). 360M / 31M comes out to around 10 people per cow, which will feed them once a day 3oz for 230 days. So the US has enough beef to serve every man, woman and child a a 3oz steak serving once every 38 hours, all year long.
Of course, nothing close to this amount is actually consumed, and at least 23% of it is entirely wasted in production, 7.1M cattle annually are effectively turned into garbage before product can hit store shelves.
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