I do like my beef and we’ll say I eat, on average, one meal a day involving cow meat. It could be a pastrami sandwich, a cheeseburger, or the occasional steak filet. So whatever a reasonable average serving size among those items might be, once a day.
I’m 22 years old, though I probably didn’t eat much if any beef during the early years of life. Let’s say I started my current habits around 7, so 15 years of daily beef-eating.
How many whole cows does that amount to?
We did this exact question very recently. I like to remember that I gave a good answer. I will see if I can find it.
Ah, I didn’t notice it. I did see a rash of meat-related threads though and that’s what has me wondering.
Isn’t a cow about 1000 lbs? And a typical serving perhaps 1/4 to 1/2 of a lb?
Let’s assume you eat about a quarter pound per day, or roughly two pounds per week. 50ish weeks a year gives us 100 pounds per year, times 18 assuming you were beef-free until age 4. So our rough estimate is 1,800lbs consumed. (or 1500 given the 15 years stipulated in your OP.)
A commonly-cited figure for “beef-per-cow” is 500-600 pounds, so this would put you at somewhere between three and four cows. Not too bad, IMO.
Well, Kharmically there must be a measure for the true mean. You have eaten a couple of cows, but how may cows have you eaten? That is a much different average.
Grumble…Grumble, add an “N” in there somewhere.
Yes, but not all of a cow is edible meat. Typical is 50-60% meat, so awldune’s estimate of 500-600 pounds of meat is accurate. (The remaining 40-50% is made into leather, glue, bone meal, etc. Hardly anything goes unused!)
Thanks guys. I had a date tonight and I casually mentioned to her that I recently calculated I had eaten about 3 cows in my life. She was impressed. 
It’s a good thing she was impressed, because you are actually just about average, at 100 lbs/yr: http://www.worldwatch.org/node/1626#2
As a fine point some of your beef was likely from steers as well.