How does it take over 600 gallons of water to make a single hamburger?
In: Biology
I’ll also add that, even if we assume it takes 600 gallons of water to raise a cow from newborn to “ready to be made into a hamburger”, this number is still egregiously misleading. You get more than just a single hamburger from a single cow.
If we assume an average of 430 pounds of meat per cow (see https://www.oda.state.ok.us/food/fs-cowweight.pdf), that means approximately 1.4 gallons of water per pound of beef.
A typical fast food restaurant hamburger patty is 0.25 pounds. So, if we were crazy and turned all those excellent cuts of steak into ground beef and made hamburger patties, we would get 1,720 patties, bringing us to about 0.35 gallons of water per hamburger patty. This is 5.58 cups of water. Per hamburger. Not 600 gallons.
This all of course ignores water used for the ingredients to make the bun and toppings.
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