Human Footprint Part 3

The loaves each of us will eat in our lifetime, 4376 loaves of bread. That's more than 87,000 slices. It's true that we can't live on bread alone and thankfully we don't have to. The hot dog and the hamburger fill the gap. U.S. consumers spend nearly $4 billion on hot dogs and sausages and supermarkets alone. We are the hot dog eating champions of the world. Because we each consume 5442 of them in our lives. Most of this happens on Independence Day. When 150 million hot dogs get devoured, enough to stretch along the entire coastline of the United States. But as much as we relish our hot dogs, that's nothing compared to our love affair with the hamburger. Americans ate 47 billion of them last year. In our lifetime, the amount of hamburger each of us will eat equals the weight of a family car. Add more than 5000 hot dog rolls and more than 12,000 hamburger buns to the bread you eat, and this is what you will get through. You could say it's an American obsession. And as our children grow into young teenagers, their taste buds will lead them toward everything sweet from soda to candy. There'll be no stopping them. And we're ready. 1351 ABC and D come with this face the camera. Action Mike. Cut. Cut. Well, that was great. Those guys up here. I need anybody that's big. Action Mike. A lot of potatoes. It's a lot of paper. Maybe we need more big guys. Do we have any more big guys? It's more weight than nothing can handle. Okay back to one. Here we go. We're rolling everybody. Stand by. Locking up. Hang on. Action Mike. This is the story of our human footprint, the Mark we all leave on the world simply by living in it. American kids are exposed to a world of food choices. Some they'll find attractive others they'll try to avoid. If our two 12 year olds have free reign in the supermarket, they'll more often than not choose a lifetime supply of candy. Each of us gobbles an average of nearly 25 pounds of candy each year. Or a shopping cart pull. Over a lifetime that works out to be 14,518 candy bars or 12 of these carts. A diet of candy bars adds 1056 pounds to a lifetime's sugar mountain. This may not look like much, but when you consider that this big bag holds just 5 pounds, you need more than 200 of them to make this lifetime's pile. The healthy option is to eat plenty of fruit and vegetables, but in order to get them to us, they have to undergo processing and transportation that makes our human footprint wider and deeper. This apple is just one of 11,196 will eat in our lifetime in season apples like these grow all over the country, but out of season they come from all over the world and must be stored and shipped. Food preservation means wider variety all year round. The ones you'll find in the supermarket are likely to have been sprayed with pesticides and chilled to very low temperatures in the winter months, some will stay in a warehouse for nearly a year before being shipped to us from across the country. Our youngsters are consuming more fruit. Take bananas, we think of them as an everyday food, nothing fancy about a banana. Yet the amount of bananas we each eat will have traveled 11 million air miles to reach us. And here they are at the end of their journey. A lifetime supply. 5000 67 bananas. If that's more than you bargained for, just imagine what you're living room would look like if it was filled with a lifetime supply of oranges. Here's how they stack up. If you add together the distance each orange has traveled to get to you, it comes to 23 million miles. The same as going to the moon and back. 50 times. We each peel our way through 12,888 oranges. Most of our food has to be delivered as cleanly and conveniently as possible. We like everything nicely washed, packed, and especially wrapped. Then when we've unpacked our groceries, we throw all that packaging away. In yet another plastic bag in the trash can. Over a lifetime, we'll each throw away enough of it to fill up one of those trucks. That's 29,700 pounds or just under 15 tons of it. All tossed out by each and every one of us. It's not just plastic wrappers that we throw away. We also toss a huge amount of aluminum into the trash, and most of it is soda cans. Let's face it, we invented soda drinks. Soda drinks have become an immense industry. Every day, 178 million cans are popped open across the country. That's more than 2000 cans, a second. And exactly how many cans is that over a 77 year lifetime? 10,015 thousand? Not even close. It is taken many hours for these dedicated volunteers to lay out all the soda cans we each will get through. Just guess how many that is. The average American will consume 43,371 cans of soda over his or her lifetime.