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Smells Like Fish
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Personally, I don’t eat fish. I just could never acquire a taste for it. I must be in the minority because the world consumption of fish in 2007 was about 331 Billion pounds. One third of this was produced in fish farms and the rest was captured. That is about 55 pounds of fish for every person on earth. Umm! I wonder who got my 55 pounds?
There is an old saying “you are what you eat”. According to Greenpeace 4,500 man made chemicals fall into the most serious category. These, are known as persistent organic pollutants (POPs). They're resistant to breakdown and have the potential to accumulate in the tissues of living organisms. That includes all marine life and the POPs cause hormone disruption in us which can, in turn, cause reproductive problems, induce cancer, suppress the immune system and interfere with normal development in children.
If we continue to pollute our oceans, what we will become is a repository for these persistent organic pollutants. Fish is supposed to be good for us, not something that causes cancer and genetic abnormalities. Okay, well, that is my preaching out of the way. Now what does 331 Billion pounds of fish look like? I have no idea but I bet it smells bad.
Maybe we can use a metaphor to understand just how much fish that really is.
The Washington Monument weighs 181,708,000 pounds. If we made the building from the stinky fish, (no inference intended because it is in the Capitol where politicians are) we eat for one year it would equal 1756 Washington monuments.
Look at it another way. If we took the oil from these fish and used it to propel a single Hummer, it would last for about one day. Okay that’s not true, but the 1756 Washington monuments is true. |
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Eating Our Way to the Stars
Seven out of ten hamburgers are consumed in restaurants, mostly quick food restaurants. Cheeseburgers comprise 62% of all burgers served in commercial foodservice. Now guess how many hamburgers are served in the US alone? Go ahead guess!
You are right! More then you can count. According to meat industry statistics, 14 billion burgers are consumed every year in the United States. 14 billion! I don’t know about you, but I just cannot picture that amount of meat.
So, I did a little exercise. I wondered what it would take to deliver all that meat into orbit around the Earth. I know that’s weird, but it does help us understand the enormity of the consumption of burgers. I had to make some assumptions. First, I averaged each burger to weigh a ¼ pound. When you times .25 pounds by 14 million burgers and divide it by 4 then divide by 2000 used you get 1,750,000 tons of meat (hopefully all beef).
According to NASA, the Space Shuttle can deliver a payload of about 27 tons. Some quick math shows that it would take 65,000 trips ( one every eight minutes or so) for Discovery to deliver into orbit the meat from all the hamburgers eaten by Americans in one year. Consideration has been given to the fact that the astronauts would probably eat a few of the burgers during the trip.
I could be wrong so please do the math and prove me wrong.
Who Drinks More Wine than the French? The Pope!
The annual world consumption volume of Wine is 6,236,802,000 gallons per year. That is a lot of hangovers and it is about 1 gallon for every person in the world.
This is interesting. The country with highest volume consumed per capita is the Vatican City State with 62 liters for each of the 932 citizens. France is number three with 55.85 liters per person (population 60 million). The US is about 8.7 liters per person.
So what does over 6 billion gallons of wine look like?
On US 85, traveling North to between Atlanta and Washington DC there is a town called Gaffney in South Carolina. It’s main claim to fame is a gigantic water tower constructed to look like a peach. This tower holds about 1 million gallons of water and serves the towns citizens.
We would have to build 6236 water towers this size to hold the wine the world consumes in just one year. I am sure that would make the town of Gaffney, SC the most popular torist city for the citizens of Vatican City and France.
Holly Sugar Cube Batman!
The world’s annual consumption of sugar is approximately 170 million tons. In the USA sugar consumption is about 64 pounds per person. In Brazil, it is over 125 pounds per person. Wow, the Brazilians eat their weight in sugar every year. That is a lot chocolate candy. I wonder how they can wear all those skimpy bikinis.
It is hard to imagine 170 million tons of sugar so let’s do a little exercise. The Empire State Building is said to be 365,000 tons in weight. It would take the equivalent of 465 Empire State buildings to match the world yearly consumption of sugar.
Salt, So Much Salt
Ummm, chips with salt, nuts with salt, everything with salt. What a wonderful natural resource. Salt was once used for money. If it still was how rich we would all be. According to the Salt Institute 240 Million metric tons of salt are produced worldwide each year. Much is used for human consumption, but salt is also used for animal nutrition, highway safety, water softening and other industrial uses.
It is hard to imagine how much salt makes up 240 metric tons, so I broke it down for you. It is 8,465,760,000,000 ounces. Okay I know! Well how about this? If you put 3 ounces of salt in a standard shaker 1 inch in diameter and placed them in a straight line it would be 44 million miles. Two years supply would almost reach from the Earth to the Sun.
I could be wrong so please do the math and prove me wrong.
Global Soft Drink Consumption is 1.5 Liters a Year. That is a Lot of Cola
Global soft drink consumption is 1.5 liters a year. This included bottled water, as well as carbonated and none carbonated drinks. The Mississippi river flows at 1.6 billion gallons per second. All soft drinks consumed in 1 year equal 248 seconds ( 4.13 minutes) of Mississippi river flow.
Here is another fact that is actually scary, because where do all those plastic bottles go? Imagine a line of 2-liter plastic bottles (diameter 4 inches) in a big line. That line would be 48,076,923 miles long. That is almost half way to the Sun.
Here is how I figured that:
1,500,000,000,000 Liters divides by 2 (2-Liter Bottle) equals
750,000,000,000 bottles times 4 inches (diameter of average bottle)
Equals
3,000,000,000,000 inches divided by 12 inches (ft)
250,000,000,000 divided by 5200 ft. (mile) = 48,076,923 miles
I could be wrong so please do the math and prove me wrong. |