Peter Gleick Considers Water for Food & Veggie Burrito (Papalote:-)?)

[Guest guest]

Pacific Institute's Peter Gleick has been blogging on water use at

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/gleick/index On May 5, 2009, he posted the

following on The Water to Grow Beef:

 

In the water world there is growing interest in measuring and reporting how much

water is needed to produce " things " -- goods and services that humans desire.

See the table " The Water Content of Things " from the new volume of The World's

Water 2008-2009 (Peter Gleick, editor, Island Press, Washington D.C.). Several

different tools and approaches have been developed and described, including

" virtual water " (most people, including me, credit this concept to Professor

Tony Allen of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London);

the " water footprint " ; and " embedded water. " All of these are based on the same

idea: it takes water to do things. One of the most remarkable, and most remarked

on, numbers to come out of these efforts is the water to produce beef, and so

that is my " water number " for today's post:

Water Number: It takes around 16,000 liters (or kilograms) of water (and

sometimes up to 70,000 kilograms) to make a single kilogram of beef.

For those of you who have no basis for comparison, this is a VERY BIG NUMBER. It

takes only around 1000 kilograms of water to make a kilogram of grain, which

partly explains why it is so big for beef -- it take a lot of grain, forage, and

roughage to feed a cow, as well as water to drink and service the cow. When all

of this is added up, it comes to around 16,000 kg water/kg meat produced. In

comparison, other meats like chicken, lamb, and goat also require substantial

amounts of water, but typically far less than beef.

There is no doubt that the consumption of beef (and meat generally) worldwide

has a very serious water cost, as well as other environment costs in terms of

land use, water contamination, and more. Moreover, global consumption of meat is

growing, and this is placing more and more pressure on the global production of

food. In the richer countries of the world like the U.S., Japan, and Europe, we

get about 30 to 35% of our calories from meat (and we eat a lot of calories

compared to the poorer countries); developing countries have typically only

gotten about 20% of food calories from meat. As this changes -- and it is

changing rapidly in places like China, where meat consumption is growing very

rapidly -- it will place more and more pressure on grain production and trade.

I'm not a vegetarian, and I'm certainly not in a position to ask you to be. But

in coming years, there must be a better, more open debate and discussion about

water for food and about how we are going to meet the food needs of our growing

populations. There is no single answer to this: we must boost crop yields, we

must reduce waste post harvest and in our kitchens and dining rooms (as much as

30% of the food Americans buy gets thrown out), and, yes, we must seriously

consider rethinking our diets. Maybe I'll have a vegetarian burrito today

instead.

Posted By: Peter Gleick (Email) | May 05 at 02:04 PM