DailyDirt: Meaty Metrics

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Fri, Jun 29th 2012 5:00pm — Michael Ho

Analyzing baseball statistics turned into a huge field called sabermetrics. A long time ago, geeks were weird people who performed strange stunts like biting the heads off chickens. But geeks nowadays are gathering stats on just about everything, so here are just a few meaty figures to chew on.

The Big Mac serves as an interesting economic tool -- providing a global standard for comparing national currencies and economic activity. Analyzing the Big Mac consumption per country can show interesting trends in wages and how economies reacted to the Great Recession -- although not every country sells Big Macs. [url]
The price of a Big Mac jumped 26% in Argentina because the government of Argentina was playing around with its national inflation numbers -- and pressuring McD's to keep its prices low. If Big Macs didn't lose their freshness, there might have been an arbitrage opportunity.... [url]
The number two burger chain in the US (for 2011) goes to Wendy's -- as Wendy's US sales topped $8.5 billion and Burger King trailed at $8.4 billion. McDonald's crushed both of them with $34 billion in sales last year. [url]
The US consumed almost 38 million tons of meat in 2007 (at 125.4 kg per person), but Luxembourg is the country with the highest meat consumption per capita (136.5 kg per person). Obviously, population figures into Luxembourg's bragging rights -- and likewise China's population makes its consumption of 54.1kg of meat per person an impressive total of around 77 million tons. [url]
To discover more food-related links, check out what's floating around in StumbleUpon. [url]

By the way, StumbleUpon can also recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Filed Under: big mac, burger chains, consumption, economics, food, meat, sabermetrics, statistics
Companies: burger king, mcdonald's, wendy's

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Anonymous Coward, 29 Jun 2012 @ 5:16pm

the big mac index
there are some countries that don't even sell a big mac, or have a McDs, and McDs are considered upscale restaurants in some places outside the US. seriously.
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Pixelation, 29 Jun 2012 @ 5:29pm

77 million tons of meat. I wonder if anyone has calculated the volume of farts produced.
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Michael Ho (profile), 1 Jul 2012 @ 10:53pm

Re:
via http://www.epa.gov/rlep/faq.html

Globally, ruminant livestock produce about 80 million metric tons of methane annually, accounting for about 28% of global methane emissions from human-related activities. An adult cow may be a very small source by itself, emitting only 80-110 kgs of methane, but with about 100 million cattle in the U.S. and 1.2 billion large ruminants in the world, ruminants are one of the largest methane sources. In the U.S., cattle emit about 5.5 million metric tons of methane per year into the atmosphere, accounting for 20% of U.S. methane emissions.
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