What does 21.7 million pounds of ground beef look like? I mean how big a mountain is that? I want a visual.?

Question

I want to better understand the enormity of this. I am also curious about what they plan to do with all that beef.

Answer 1

go to the grocery store and pick up a 1 pound package of ground beef. now picture 21.7 million of them.

Answer 2

That's about 10 million kilogrammes. Let's assume:

a) density of beef is a bit more than that of water (about 20% more);

b) it's piled up in a cone twice as wide as it is high (r = h).

Volume of a cone is 1/3*pi*r^2*h ~ h^3 = 8*10^6

h ~ 200m

So it's a pile about 650 feet high and around a quarter of a mile across the base.

That's a lot of beef.

Answer 3

I like the 650 foot cone of beef answer.  A simple way to provide a more common visual answer it to line a smal box with a plastic bag and pack the beef into it.  then simply measure the cube or rectangular box shape you get and multipy.

I think use of a volume shaped like a building will make it easier to get a mental picture.  For example there may be a building near you with something close to the volume you get.

I have never seen a 650 foot high cone.

Did you know that Mc Donalds uses over 750 million chickens making nuggets each year world wide.  There is a mountain of flesh there.

Answer 4

I don't get a mental image of a meat mountain. I can't get over the visual of all of the cattle killed for nothing, of all the waste because someone was careless in handling the processing.  The real shame also is that 99.9% of that ground beef is perfectly good, they just can't detect the part that is bad, so it all has to come off the market.  As what they will do with it, it will have to be rendered down as animal feed.  The same thing they do with dead animals.

Answer 5

Hahaha...I was wondering that too!

Answer 6

Assuming a specific gravity of about 0.9 you could convert your beef to water and you would have an acre (43,560 sq. ft) covered about 10 feet deep.  Interestingly enough you would have to have a layer of ice about 10 feet deep on all the land surface on earth to cause the predicted meter rise in the oceans.  the last time I looked out my door there wasn't ten feet of ice.