Video: The hidden costs of hamburgers

Friday, September 07, 2012 - Raw Team

On average, Americans eat three times more meat than people in other countries.¹ But what would happen if the rest of the world caught up? Could our planet cope?

This short animation takes a look at the ‘all-American’ hamburger and highlights the hidden costs.

Quick take-away facts:¹

• From the end of WWII to the mid-1970s – beef consumption per person doubled in the US
• Livestock farming uses 30% of the earth’s entire land area (that’s counting pastures and land used to grow grain for feed)
• Livestock production is a major contributor to greenhouse gas pollution – right up there with cars, planes and trains
• The way hamburgers are manufactured means that E. coli contamination from a single carcass can potentially be spread to thousands to burgers
• If all Americans ate no meat or cheese one day a week, it would have the same climate-change prevention effect as taking 7.6 million cars off the road for one year.

Our sources

1. The Center for Investigative Reporting have provided a referenced transcript for the video