> 275g per day is a huge average

Including food waste it's fairly reasonable. Commercial restaurants waste an amazing amount of food everyday.

It's really not reasonable, even if you consider 50% waste. There's no reason for a sedentary person to eat even close to that much protein.

I think he's referring to g of meat and not pure protein. I'd say that the number is pretty close or maybe even low. I mean it's not just steak /chicken /burgers, Bacon, lunch meat, sausage etc all adds up.

Can a restaurant really afford to waste huge amounts of expensive meat every day? I thought their entire margin was based on minimizing expensive waste.

Chains like McDonald's do in fact waste large quantities of food (in absolute terms). I think this is largely caused by the even larger quantities they sell. But to a certain degree it is down to completely artificial and arguably pointless metrics:

1. They produce (or used to, this practice has been removed in Germany, I think) a large amount of food on stock and kept it warm. If it isn't sold after a few minutes (15?) it gets trashed. This is to optimize the speed of sales.

2. They hand out bizarrely large quantities (especially soft drinks, but also cheap stuff like fries) that often the customer won't eat completely. This is for a reason that I don't understand. Might be a US thing, though.

The majority of food waste however is fruit and vegetables (about half), some meat is still wasted but is among the lowest category in food waste.