I've been looking at fermi problems lately, and decided to tackle the problem by myself. There's some excellent stuff on fermi problem available on the net-- wonderful collection here , and wiki article here but check this out before anything else. After trying out a few of the problems, I figured I'd be doing humankind a favor with my momo-calculations. Here's the math:
We start with the momo-eating population. I want only the Nepali momos eaten, so I'll ignore that people unrelated to Nepal may like momos too. The Nepali population is a good place to start from-- there are about 3 crore Nepalis, a fourth of whom eat momo regularly. That gives us ~ 80 lakh momo-eating people.
How many momos does one of these momo eaters eat over a year? One plate of momo is 10 momos, and momo's eaten about once every two weeks or so, thus every person has 25 plates of momo over a year, and we get 250 momos a year per person. Multiply that by the number of momo eaters, and we have 2 arab momos a year. Remember, a fermi problem's about getting the magnitude right, so it's close enough if we're off by less than a factor of 10-- meaning it can go over 10 arab, or well below an arab, and we'd still be guessing correctly.
So there it is then-- Nepalis eat 2 billion momos in a year. I don't want to end there though. I want to calculate how many goats and buffaloes and chicken that would be, and other fun things we can do with momos. So we'll keep rounding that number up and down to make calculations easier.
To begin with, I want to calculate the volume of the momos. A momo's usually about 5-6 cm wide, so I'll assume it to be a perfect sphere of 3 cm radius, and I come up with a volume of around 30 cm^3. So there's around 30 of them in a litre. An olympic-sized swimming pool is 2.5 million liters in volume, so it can hold 75 million momos. I'll average around 1.5 billion momos a year for convenience sake. So if you put all the momos Nepalis eat in a year, you'd fill about 20 olympic-sized swimming pools. To be sure, they're all be packed tight so that they end up as a huge-ass olympic-sized momo, like when you bring them back home and they all fuse together into a mega-momo. For your convenience, this is what an olympic swimming pool looks like [wikipedia]:
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Now lets calculate the toll that momo consumption takes on Animals. We'll begin by dividing the momos by their types. I know most people prefer buff momos, then chicken momos, then vegetables momos. Lets assume that 40 percent of all momos are buff momos, and another 40 percent are chicken. 15 percent are vegetable momos, and the remaining five percent could be mutton and all the other weird types that sound so-wrong, like paneer, and cheese and egg and so on.
How many momos can you make for a kilo of meat? There's ten momos per plate, and every momo has 30 cm^3 volume, so assuming water-density and that about a third of a momo is meat, you get 10 plate of momos per kilo of meat. I don't even want to think about the profits there.
Now, I don't know how much a raanga weighs, but I'd guess it to be around 150 Kilos(I looked it up online and they probably weigh more, but this is for fun so go along). And a raanga of that size probably gives 60 kilo of usable meat. Assuming ten percent wastage, you get 54*10 = 540 plates of momos per raanga. Lets make that 500 for calculation's sake.
40 percent of 2 billion is 800 million momos. 800 million momos are 80 million plates. 80 million plates divided by 500 plates per raangaa gives us 160,000 raangas. Since momo consumption varies by days of year, we'll just assume that there are 400 days in a year. That means, 400 Raangas are turned to momo every day in Nepal(mostly Kathmandu).
Lets go for the chickens now. I'll assume 70 percent of a chicken is usable for momos. A chicken weighs 2.5 kilos, so we get 1.75 kilos of usable meat. I'll make that 2 kilos, so now we have 20 plates of momo per chicken. Again, there are 80 million plates of chicken momo, and 20 plate per chicken, so that gets us four million chickens a year. That may sound like a lot, but keep in mind that the annual chicken production of Nepal is around 60 million heads a year, and that is nowhere near the demand, and thus the imports from India. Anyway, to take things back momos, Ten thousand chickens are turned to momo every day in Nepal(mostly Kathmandu).
I don't want to go into goats and vegetables because that's not very interesting, and the numbers are not very big. So there you are, the number of momos eaten in a year!