this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2026
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It would be insightful if the math checked out.
You can get roughly 1600 beef patties out of one cow. Your 6.5M burgers a day use up 125,937 cows per month and there's 95M cattle in the US.
Honestly mind boggling that 125 thousand cows are slaughtered each month just to support maccas. Once you add various other places selling beef burgers and other beef cuts and I imagine the number can get a lot bigger
In any case it’s despicable.
You misspelled "delicious". Not McDonald's specifically, that's Trump ass sucking garbage.
Yeah, I was about to say: if the Village People is the sound of US fascism, McDonald's is its flavor.
More its smell than its flavor. Though about half of us are pretty salty about the situation.
Most fast food burgers are made from depleted milk cows, so there's actually little overlap with places that sell beef from dedicated meat cows
I have no idea if this is true but it is so genious and calculating that if it is not, i commend you. Wow. You can still call it American (or whatever country you are in) beef and not lie, but it is such shit quality and at such a low price that it has never occured to people. Much like "genuine leather". Humanity amazes me.
Yeah, if everyone stopped eating at McDonald's, supermarket beef wouldn't actually get cheaper, but dog food would. There are a thousand more tricks and shortcuts like that in the animal industry - I'd really recommend watching Dominion, as it shows quite a few more of those
Hate to break it to you but your local supermarket and big grocery chain uses cow beef for ground beef also. Same stuff as McDonald's. You guys are perpetuating old info (circa 2012) that has to do with XF trim and LFTB.
Will make sure to watch it. Sounds like something more people should do. Thanks!
cows aren't killed for burgers.
How so?
burgers are made from less desirable parts. nowhere near the majority of a cow becomes ground beef.
They’re killed for their crimes against humanity. We just don’t let them go to waste afterward.
The other number should be the one that's mind boggling. We see the number "million" so much and don't grasp its scale.
The burgers aren't made from the beef, they're made from all the left shit
Mcdonalds beef patties?
Or regular?
Coz they are thinner than a pickle slice these days
1/10 lbs patties like they always were
McDonald's gets the very last stage of leftover beef from the carcass. If they don't buy it, it goes to things like animal feed.
I don't know how much McDonald's-grade beef is on a cow, but I'm guessing the real numbers are how much non-McDonald's beef people are eating, divided by the average weight of cows
So wrong here. They grind trimmings, the same trimmings that are ground into ground beef that sits in the counters of your local retailer. I sell this shit and can guarantee you the McDonald's system is not my last option, those trimmings all make it into the food supply. Also you can't feed cow parts to food animals ,it's a BSE risk.
Looks like McDonald's changed their sourcing about 10 years ago. Now they use trimmings as you said; previously they used pink slime.
For the record, I never said (nor implied) that it would be fed to food animals. I was thinking more like dog food
They used up to 7% LFTB back in the day. It looked nothing like the emulsified chicken pictured in the articles. It is a wholesome product yet not one I would choose to put in my ground beef due to the amount of connective tissue. You're close to the source, have any questions you'd like honest answers for?
There's a whole bunch of beef that's not edible by USDA standards, and that's what gets made into dog food. I used to date somebody that worked at a glass-bottle dairy, and they'd eat it anyways, but it was clearly marked on the package "not for human consumption".
That count is way off.
An average cow is 600kg, and yields 36-48% in pure meat, so around 250kg.
McDonald's standard patty is 45g, while larger patties - say, like, the Quarter Pounder - go up to 120g.
Presuming 2/3 of all burgers per cow are regular, and 1/3 are Quarter Pounder size, then we have a simple formula to solve:
2x*0.045kg + x*0.120kg = 250kg
That makes X approximately 1190, so the total number of burgers is ~3570, over double of your calculations.
1600 patties per cow is a value I've heard since I was a kid in the 70s. It wasn't McD specifically. Maybe the cows have grown fatter or the patties smaller over the decades.
Anyway, my point was, hundreds of millions of burgers doesn't deplete the country of cattle heads. It was an remark about orders of magnitude.
I'd say that McD's patties are super small. Your average patty will be around 6-8oz, so 170-230g, which is much closer to your initial number of 1600 parties per cow.
Oh yeah, those cows are party animals 🙂
How I imagine these cows partying
Bold of you to assume McD's patties are pure meat. Probably half the weight is extra fat and pink slime, so you can easily double that.
Maybe in the US, in Australia they are 100% Angus beef
That was my take also.
c/theydidthemath
Forgot this exists, no more wondering like op.