In another thread the topic of pizza led to someone quoting a remarkable statistic: 251,770,000 pounds of pepperoni are consumed in this country each year.
That’s millions of pounds. Now, consider how many pigs and cows are needed JUST for pepperoni.
Then consider 150 million hot dogs.
14 billion hamburgers.
The egg board says the US produces 75 BILLION eggs per year.
How much corn do we produce in order to supply ourselves with the millions of pounds of Doritos and Fritos and corn oil and corn syrup and corn bread and corn starch and fresh corn?
I can’t ever seem to comprehend the amount of food that we produce, and the fact that we not only produce enough to supply the ridiculous amount of food we have available, but that we produce so much that millions of pounds of it ends up in the garbage.
It’s really astonishing.
And I think this post is the very definition of MPSIMS.
If you divide all of those numbers by 300 million (estimated population of US minus ~12 million veggies) the numbers become quite pedestrian. That’s only ~4/5 lb of pepperoni, 1/2 a hot dog, ~47 hamburgers, and 250 eggs per person/year.
My astonishment is not in our consumption, it’s the PRODUCTION. It’s so vast it’s beyond my mind to fathom the land.
And it IS the eggs being used in baked goods and similar thoughts… for every acre of corn that gets picked to eat fresh (and there’s a LOT of such acres…) how many for every box of frozen? Every can? Every package of tortillas, bag of potato chips, etc.etc.
I agree that 13 oz. of pepperoni/person/year isn’t that much. I do wonder, though, what you’d get if you looked at other meats.
Still, Stoid,what I think is astonishing you is the sheer size of the biosphere. As many eggs as we eat a year, how many eggs are laid by wild birds every year?
Just to supply the US population’s calorie needs requires ~ 50 million tons of food per year. The US is also one of the largest food exporting countries in the world. We probably feed several times our own population on top of that.
I’ve always been amazed in the opposite way–I start out by assuming that vast amounts of things must be produced; then I feel amazed by how that amount isn’t, in fact, so big it can’t be quantified. The best example that comes to mind this early in the morning is pumpkins… it turns out that the state of Illinois alone produces a large percentage of the country’s pumpkins. What? Just Illinois? I’ve never seen a pumpkin farm here…
There’s other things, like grass seed and christmas trees. Oregon produces the bulk of both. Now, I’ve seen plenty of christmas tree farms around Portland, but to look at them you’d think they’d only support the metro area or maybe just our region. Oh no. It’s most of them in the US.
Some of those numbers are certainly low. 250 eggs per (non-vegetarian) person (counting the eggs used in baking) might be about right. 47 hamburgers per person and .8 pounds of pepperoni per person both sound a little low. .5 hot dogs per person is absurdly low. (Note that all these figures are per year.) Where do these figures come from? No, I don’t want a link to the SDMB thread that they come from. I want some other source. You know, it’s a good idea to think through numbers and try to see if they are remotely reasonable rather than going, “Oh, wow! Big numbers! My brain can’t hold them.”
Are you saying that it’s just fine to post statistics that are clearly hopelessly wrong because it’s too much bother having to think them through? The motto of the SDMB is “Fighting Ignorance Since 1973,” not “Posting the First Thing That Comes to Mind, Regardless of Whether It Makes Any Sense.”