Americans eat about 72 billion—that's right, BILLION—quarter-pounders a year.
How many cows does it take to produce all that beef? How about over 36 million!
Quick Facts: Quarter—pound Hamburger
- It takes an average of 600 gallons of water to make every quarter-pound burger.
- Think about it as 2,400 one—quart bottles of water, or enough to fill 11 bathtubs. For one burger.
- A cow had to eat over 1.3 pounds of grain to make that quarter-pound of meat.
- 1.2 pounds of soil were washed away by erosion.
- That soil is gone forever and most likely causing big trouble somewhere downstream.
Hamburger
Have you ever thought about what goes into a hamburger?
If you look a little closer you'll see it's a lot more than just meat—and we're not talking about the mayo on top, either.
Cow
One cow. 500 pounds of meat. 2,000 quarter-pounders.
That means a single cow could keep you munching quarter-pounders every day for five years. But to grow that cow, you have to grow a lot of...
Grain
A single cow can eat 16 pounds of grain a day.
Growing that grain isn't doing any favors for you or the environment. It takes lots of energy (fossil fuels like gas and oil) to plant and harvest the grain.
Besides plenty of water, it also takes lots of fertilizer and pesticide to keep it growing and healthy. And all that stuff pollutes the air, water, and land.
Land
Lots of land is needed to grow grain.
And lots more is needed to grow the grass that cows feed on before they get the grain that fattens them up.
And wherever there's grass and grain and lots of cows, there isn't much room for anything else—like birds, badgers and many other kinds of wildlife.
Soil
Then there's soil erosion.
(That's when rain washes soil off the land and into places it shouldn't be—like streams, rivers, and lakes.) Erosion happens when we grow grain.
It also happens where cows munch away too much grass and trample the bare ground. And in some parts of the world, people cut down whole forests to make more grazing land for cows.
What happens when there aren't trees to protect the land? More erosion—and lots of it.
Water
It takes an average of 600 gallons of water to make a quarter-pound burger.
That is enough to fill 11 bathtubs. Why? Cows drink it. Grain needs it to grow. You even need water to grind up the meat.
And then there's water pollution from all the cow poop that washes into streams and soaks into the ground.
