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).
> 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.
US produces about 27 billion pounds of beef, roughly half of that weight comes from feedlots where they eat ~80% of feedlot calories comes from grains.
There's a bunch of numbers tossed around but it's something like 60-70 billion pounds of grain to get those 27 billion pounds of beef.
Cattle production in the US is something like 20% greater than Brazil, the next highest producer according to the first source[1] I found, producing literally 1/5 of the world's total beef.
There's piles more data out there, and probably a lot more to say, but this is probably the answer to a first approximation.
We (in the US) killed 28 million cattle for beef in 2015[0]. Just cause we like the taste of beef.
I gotta be honest, 13,000 animals for a common food product is pretty much a drop in the bucket. Amortize Splenda's animal cost over a 40 year usage timeline against beef, and you're talking 0.001%. (And would drop rapidly if I included chickens, pork, and fish.)
You are right. I was thinking of the decline in dairy consumption in the US, which has been decreasing. Per-capita cow's milk consumption has been decreasing for 70 years here:
Beef consumption doesn't appear directly tied to development. According to https://sentientmedia.org/beef-consumption-in-the-us/, beef consumption has been falling in the US since the 1970s. Even so, the US is only second in consumption per capita for all countries, behind Argentina.
I think half a cow is like ~250lbs of beef, so with an 8oz serving sizer per person that’s 125 meals for a family of four so maybe a year eating beef every third dinner?
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