Short answers, pulled from the story.
The first steak ever eaten was likely a charred slab of aurochs hunted by Neanderthals in the caves of Lascaux over 17,000 years ago. These prehistoric hunters revered the animal and depicted its struggle and death in vibrant ochre and charcoal on the cave walls. This event established a relationship between humanity and bovine flesh that would define civilization for millennia.
Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations supply 70.4% of cows in the US market and 99% of all meat in the United States supply. These factory farms are engines of efficiency that create unsanitary conditions where E. coli O157:H7 thrives. The scale of this operation is staggering with 42% of medically important antibiotic use in the U.S. dedicated to cattle.
Cattle populations graze around 26% of all land on Earth excluding the vast agricultural fields used to grow their feed. The industry is the primary driver of deforestation in the Amazon where 91% of all land deforested since 1970 has been converted to cattle ranching. This inefficiency translates into a massive carbon footprint with beef contributing about 4 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases in 2010 alone.
The world's first outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy occurred in the United Kingdom in 1984. This event was triggered by the use of meat and bone meal in cattle feed and led to a global crisis of confidence in beef safety. The disease has since spread to other countries including a fully domestic case in Texas in 2005.
The United States, Brazil, and China produced the most beef in 2018. The global consumption of beef remains high despite recommendations from the World Cancer Research Fund to limit red meat to no more than three servings per week. The International Agency for Research on Cancer has found that unprocessed red meat probably causes cancer.
The legal prohibition of beef in India was signed into law in 2017. This law has created market opportunities for leather traders and meat producers elsewhere with predictions of a twenty percent shortage of beef and a thirteen percent shortage of leather in the world market. The killing of cows is prohibited by law in most North Indian states and the Constitution mandates the preservation of bovine breeds.