“The Hidden Cost of Hamburgers”, an animated short from the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR), examines the problems associated with industrial beef production.

What’s most interesting from the video is the actual number arrived at when calculating the hidden costs of the average burger: $1.51 (or $72 billion for the 48 billion burgers Americans eat every year).

From CIR:

“We looked at a range of ways beef is produced and came up with an average that is close to how a cow would be raised in Fresno, Calif.: about 1 pound of greenhouse gases per ounce of beef, or about 6½ pounds of greenhouse gases per quarter-pounder. We looked at studies that showed the health costs of treating overweight people and associated illnesses, such as high blood pressure, stroke and diabetes—that’s about 75 cents per burger. Then we looked at how much water it takes to produce a pound of beef—that’s about 50 cents per burger. We also looked at the price of a ton of carbon—that’s remarkably small for the U.S., less than one-hundredth of a penny.”

$1.51 for the average burger makes McDonald’s ”Dollar Menu” seem like a real bargain. Let’s all go put some cheap meat in our mouth!

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Jeff Cormier

Dad, husband, dog lover, law, write at DigitalDeconstruction.com and other online destinations, forever immature. It's the me that I let you know.

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