I'm confused by the number too, but not in the same way y'all are. I was thinking in terms of if I have a bacon cheeseburger and some chicken nuggets, that's three lives that had to end. So a single life seems very low.

[–] agamemnonymous 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

But those three lives are divided between all the people who ate them. They don't just wait for you to order, kill a cow for one cheeseburger, and throw the rest away.

A chicken yields about 4lbs of meat, and McNuggets weigh about 16g, which works out to about 20 5-piece meals (assuming no fillers and disregarding the breading).

A pig yields about 16lbs of bacon, and each slice weighs about an ounce, which works out to about 250 slices, or 125 2-slice portions (ignoring about 120lb of other cuts, and assuming generously sized slices). If we include the other cuts, that's an additional 240 8oz portions of sausage, roast, chops, etc.

A cow yields about 700lbs of beef, which works out to 2800 quarter pound patties.

So altogether: 1 cow, 22 pigs, and 140 chickens die to produce 2800 bacon cheeseburgers with a 5-piece nugget on the side. That's 163 lives, across 2800 meals (3040 when you factor in the rest of the pork). On average, each of those lives fed 18 people.

It is much more accurate to say 5-6% of each life is on any single consumer, and that's assuming a bacon cheeseburger with a side of nuggets. If you only eat one half pound burger and skip the bacon and nuggets, it works out to 1/1400 of a single cow's life, or about .07%.

[–] sness 2 points 4 months ago

I actually had this gym bro coworker that would eat a rotisserie chicken as his lunch every day.