what kind of energy is a hamburger?

Chemical potential energy.

potential energy

Hamburger

The average quater-pound hamburger patty begins its existence in a calf born on a privet cattle farm. For the first few months of life, the calf nurses from his mother, and then he begins to graze on pastureland. Grass is the natural diet of cows and other ruminants, animals that have evolved to extract nutrients from hardy cellulose plant matter that humans find indigestible.

After about nine months, the cow boards a tractor trailor and jouneys to a cattle feedlot, where he will spend the rest of his life, eating from a trough, in an enclosure roughly half the size of a football field. Untill the 1950's, cattle were grazed on pastureland untill big enough to slaughter, a process that took two to three years. In concentrated feedlots, cattle can be fed high-nutrient diets that allow them to grow to maturity - roughly 1,100 pounds - in as little as 14 months.

That high-nutrient nourishment represents a sophisticated diet of corn flakes mixed with other grains like sorghum and barley plus measured amounts of liquefied fat, protein mixture, vitamins, synthetic estrogen, and antibiotics. Antibiotics promote growth and prevent and treat disease. Estrogen works as a growth promoter. Other ingredients help the cow's rumen, fine-tuned to grass, digest corn instead.

More than a quarter of all corn grown worldwide is fed to cattle, primarily in the United States. Each 1.2 pounds of corn-based feed translates into a quater pound of marbled muscle tissue, which will be ground into hamburger. Growing all this corn takes reasources: nitrogen fertilizers, gasoline and diesel to power the farm machinery, and irrigation water. Intensive corn agriculture also requrires pestisides such as atrazine, a hormone-mimiking chemical that runs off feilds and has been detected in water wells throughout the Midwest.

Raising one cow requires 35 gallons of oil. Most of this energy is used to produce synthetic fertilizers made from fossil fuels, and the rest is used for milling and transportation. One-fourth of all fertilizer used in the United States goes to grow corn fed to cattle and other livestock. One-fifth of the petroleum consumed in the United-States goes to crop production and transportation. All told, the amount of energy that it takes to create a single quarter-pound hamburger patty equates to the energy in one cup of gasoline.

That quarter-pound hamburger also requires 600 gallons of water to produce, most of it to grow the corn feed and the rest to water the cattle and to cool down and reduce dust in the feedlots. Some 40 percent of all beef cattle in the United States are fattened on corn grown with water drawn from the dwindling Ogallala aquifier, an underground store of water lying under the states of Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, and Texas.

Since the cattle are confined, they stand in piles of their own manure. Manure harbors microorganisms, including the deadly strain of E. coli bacteria known as 0157:H7. About 40 percent of feedlot cattle carry this strain in their gut. If the manure is not washed off the cattle prior to slaughter, this microbe can easily enter the food supply.

Small farms tend to recycle their manure as fertilizer, but large feedlots bulldose manure into lagoons, where it slowly decomposes, posing a threat to water supplies. The high level of nutrients in manure can cause harmful algae blooms in surface water and can contaminate well water. These manure ponds also realease methane, a greenhouse gas more potent than carbon dioxide. These emissions, combined with the carbon dioxide spewed from the tailpipes of farm machinery and the fertilizer plants , mean that a single quarter-pound burger creates about eight pounds of carbon dioxide, the same amount of green house gases emitted on an eight-mile drive in and SUV.

Once the cow has grown to maturity, he is ready for the slaughterhouse and meatpacking plant. Once slaughtered, the carcass will be butchered and some of the meat ground into hamburger. Ground bits of beef from one cow will be combined with meat from other cows, making it difficult to track individual cows in the meat supply, which is why beef recalls are so massive. The meat from a single diseased cow can end up in several hundreds of packages of ground meat distributed throughout the nation.