The WATER FOOTPRINT Of Food…
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June 17, 2009Given our water problems, I found this Treehugger article informative, fascinating, frightening (?) More stuff to store at the back of the mind!
Note: In general these figures come from Waterfootprint.org (pdf file) and represent gallons of water consumed per pound of food (except for beverages, whose volumes are listed). They represent global averages, not specific conditions in any one place.
What Treehugger says:
“Keeping in mind that the water footprint of your food is only a part of the environmental impact of your diet—land use, fertilizer use and whether those are chemical or organic, how far and by what method your food is shipped, social considerations regarding land use are all also components—here’s how much water your food consumes:
If you want to really reduce the water footprint of your food then eating a diet where fruits, veggies and grains for the vast majority of your calories is clearly the way to go—it also happens to be healthier, cheaper and better for carbon emissions, by the way. But even here there are some big variations:
Lettuce — 15 gallons
Tomatoes — 22 gallons
Cabbage — 24 gallons
Cucumber — 28 gallons
Potatoes — 30 gallons
Oranges — 55 gallons
Apples — 83 gallons
Bananas — 102 gallons
Corn — 107 gallons
Peaches or Nectarines — 142 gallons
Wheat Bread — 154 gallons
Mango — 190 gallons
Avocado — 220 gallons
Tofu — 244 gallons
Groundnuts — 368 gallons
Rice — 403 gallons
Olives — 522 gallons
Chocolate — 2847 gallonsMeat & Dairy
This is where water intensity really starts increasing. If you want to reduce the water footprint of your diet, this is where you want to really cut back:Eggs — 573 gallons
Chicken — 815 gallons
Cheese — 896 gallons
Pork — 1630 gallons
Butter — 2044 gallons
Beef — 2500-5000 gallons (Global figures for the water intensity of beef vary so significantly that an average isn’t particularly informative, so a range of figures is given)Beverages
You want something to drink and keep your water footprint as low as possible? Tap water is probably the best thing, but even the most hair-shirt person wants some variety, so here is how the water footprint of some beverages breaks down:Tea (8oz) — 7 gallons
Beer, barley (8oz) — 36 gallons
Coffee (8oz) — 29 gallons
Wine (8oz) — 58 gallons”
Interesting stuff…
6 Comments
That means before AA I wasted 848 gallons per day in wine consumption alone! That’s a lot of cabbage.
That’s all fine, but what a boring life we would lead if we used this as our daily creed. What about the environmental footprint of the common car? High rise city buildings? Air travel for business around Australia and beyond? It is easy to point the finger at farmers as water and environmental vandals, but there are so many others.
Exactly – not a simple topic is it?
I commissioned an interesting article on this topic; apparently consumers in the UK and Europe are getting serious about what they buy in terms of its water footprint. Businesses have to respond in kind: http://www.dynamicexport.com.au/export/managing/what-is-water-mapping/
Let’s hope the movement makes us more aware of what products cost in terms of its water usage, if nothing else.
This is why it is so important to have a backyard vegie garden, fruit and nut trees; and make some home brew every now and then to keep sane.
If the cacao for that chocolate were being grown using irrigation in central Australia, we should rightly be outraged by the environmental degradation it would cause. However I don’t think anyone would have a problem with it growing wild in its native rainforest, would they? No one would seriously suggest we should rip it out and grow soybeans instead because producing tofu is a more efficient use of water.
Likewise, the water usage of rice should not be a concern in rainy Asian climates, but in the Murray Basin, it’s a different story.
I would argue that the water footprint in itself is not a good measure of environmental impact. Instead using an index based on artificial water use (irrigation) might be more useful. If you need to irrigate intensively to grow it, it’s probably not the greatest idea.
Seen in this way, raising beef cattle or sheep in central Australia appears a lot more environmentally sound than growing vegetables there. Yes, meat uses a lot of water to produce, but this is spread over a very large area (animals roam large distances to find grass) and irrigation is not required.