Is a Big Hunk of Steak Worth Almost 2,000 Gallons of Water?

V, your food choices are moral choices from this viewpoint also.

Dammit, I'll not enjoy a big chunk of dead cow nearly as often and likely not enjoy it nearly as much. Hell, after reading Pollan and all the related stuff, and given that grass-fed is so damned expensive....feh...perhaps ignorance is bliss, but unlike Cypher, I don't think I can re re-inserted.....I think I tried that for too many years by self-medicating and it didn't help.....usually.

Charlie, too hot to enjoy being out, so I'm torturing myself with some "news"......and watching the thunderhead in the NW....

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Collin Dunn, Huffington Post. Posted July 1, 2008.

Summer is heating up, and all the pools, barbeques, lawn-watering and the like that put our water use under the microscope, even more than it is the rest of the year. But did you know that we all have a "water-footprint"?

Quite similar in concept to the carbon footprint, our water footprints are defined as "the total volume of freshwater that is used to produce the goods and services consumed by the individual, business or nation," by Waterfootprint.org. People use lots of water for drinking, cooking and washing, but even more for producing things such as food, paper, cotton clothes, etc. The numbers are staggering.

In the US, our water footprint is 2,500 cubic meters per capita, which translates roughly to 660,430 U.S. gallons per person per year. Compare that to 700 cubic meters per year per capita (184,920 gallons) in China and 1150 cubic meters per year per capita (303,798 gallons) in Japan. That's a lot of water down the drain at our hands.

This is apropos to Graham's discussion earlier about knowing what it takes to "make" meat, and learning where it comes from; when you consider that it takes about 1,916 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef, it helps contextualize the impact of your meat-eating choices.

Sure, we can all use less, buy less and consume less, which is easy to say and hard to do, but breaking it down and considering these numbers makes one simple food choice -- to eat less meat -- have much more gravity. I'm not in to guilt-tripping anyone into a greener lifestyle, but I encourage you to ask yourself this: Is having a big hunk of steak really worth almost 2,000 gallons of water?

Reply to
Charlie
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I've not worried about water too much as we are blessed with enough. I thought that if I drank a glass of water and pissed it then evaporated and when the clouds were full it came back down. The premise was that water was not created just recycled in non human ways. Anyway if one lived in a dry spot it may get drier preventing food production all this caused my human diverging water to folks with power.

Just rained like Hades here and we were in mild drought.

Which yielded

Bill who thinks of bottle water in plastic as pollution.

Reply to
Bill

We just missed a goodun by less than five miles.......oh well, it succeeded in rasing the humidity from really bad to really, really bad....94F and 74%....drippy fer sure.

Thanks........good site and new to me.

A'yup!!

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Reply to
Charlie

Is used water destroyed? Converted into hot house gases? Leaves the planet? Water is a total renewable resource, our drinking water comes from the toilets of north Texas, our toilets water Houston. It is distribution of water that is the problem. Enjoy your steak, that water, too, shall pass.

Reply to
Don Staples

Point taken and correct. Distribution, of both water, and water dependant products, is the problem. I still stand by my concerns about the quantity of water required to produce one pound of beef. Would that figure be reduced significantly if produced and distributed locally? I am sure it would.

Distribution, both infrastructurally (is that a word) and naturally, is changing, and more than inadaquate in many areas and our habits of consumption have stressed that distribution. Areas that once had adequate water supply, and upon which industry has been based, may now be stressed and under and over supplied. Concentration of anything can be a not good thing.

The point is, we need to be aware of our stresses upon the biosphere and act accordingly to mitigate problems. What was once produced locally is often now concentrated and problems of distribution are becoming apparent. Perhaps, given market forces, fuel impact, etc., we will see a return to local production and distribution, as it well should be.

BTW, are you implying anything by pointing out the fact that you are pissing on, er, watering Houston?

Charlie

Reply to
Charlie

I haven't had a piece of meat in nearly five years. I will never eat meat again unless it's in something I accidentally ingest. It is more than a moral choice...but in reality, what more is there other than our morality? I could no longer claim to love animals of all kinds and continue to eat beef, or any other meat including fish.

When I was going to visit my mom she said, I was going to make a roast beef but forgot you were a vegetarian. So I made leg of lamb instead!! Innocent, and adorable, but anything that's alive is meat in my estimation. The microbes I swallow and kill by the trillions dailiy is not intentional and virtually imnpossible to avoid. When you see people in Asian nations wearing masks, this is usually why. Also to avoid SARS, but many to avoid inhaling sentient beings.

Reply to
Jangchub

Is 1,000 lbs of beef worth almost 2,000 gallons of water? Yes.

We could let beef cattle roam on a chunk of land, and supplement their feed with chopped waste (from corn stalks to stale breakfast cereal) or we can take that piece of land and burn fuel to cultivate it, fertilize it, water it, plant it with soybeans, keep watering it, burn fuel running the tractor again to harvest it, throw most of the plant away or feed it to cattle (oh, wait, no cattle, we won't do that any more) keep the beans, grind the beans, soak the beans, throw away the insoluble portion of the beans, and make tofu from the fluid remaining.

Which takes more energy and water?

Ranching meat animals is a very efficient means of converting inedible biomass into food. Humans have known that for thousands of years. If you have philosophical objections to eating animals, don't try to dress those objections up as environmentalism.

Reply to
none

Plants are forms of life also. Each plant we eat was once a sentient being that is now dead because we ate it. Anyone going to the extreme of wearing a surgical mask to avoid inhaling life forms might as well stop eating plants also.

What do they do with these masks when they are done? Do they attempt to shake off, remove, and otherwise save the sentient beings that are caught in them?

Reply to
Zootal

It depends on how it's cooked. I prefer mine med-rare.

Dave

Reply to
Hairy

If you are really concerned about the fresh water cycle & water quality, you should seriously conside not having a lawn. In addition to taking up water (lowering ground water tables in many areas) they are often fertilized with phosphorous throughout the year or at least when new seedlings are planted. the phos is bad for the local lake. In addition, many people use herbicides to keep a homogenous lawn (ie no weeds). I recently read an article where they say that the lawn is the most toxic place in a home. Instead of a lawn, consider a sustainable vegetable garden or growing a mix of local wild flowers which require less watering and no herbicides.

To me eating a big stake is just tasty, until I get a call from my doc saying I need to watch my weight! thanks, Simon

Reply to
Simon

Swooooshhhhh!!

Three points Simon!!

(and the crowd goes wild!!!!!)

Charlie

"A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule." ~~Michael Pollan

Reply to
Charlie

I'm curious how long it takes me to pump 2,000 gallons of water. I have a well, and the capacity of the well is such that I can only run two sprinklers at a time. I usually just run one, and I run it pretty much every day because takes a week to walk it around my property (1/3 acre lawn, fruit trees, and large garden). I use 1/2" impact sprinklers, but I don't have a clue what the gpm is. If I run it all day, I can usually finish a watering cycle in 5 days, but there isn't always someone here to tend them, so we more-or-less follow a weekly watering routine.

2,000 gallons for a steak? How much for a chicken? We ate 2 or 3 of them this last weekend (bbq with garlic, misc. spices, and eel sauce)(OK, eel sauce is weird - my wife bought it at a Korean store because she thought it was some sort of chicken marinade) (over burning charcoal to make sure I pump CO2 into the atmosphere while I'm eating meat and using water).

This isn't WWII, and I don't buy into this radical liberal buy less, consume less, use less hysteria that seems to be going around these days. Should we eat less meat? Some of us should - I eat it once a week, sometimes twice. Should we use more water? Puulleeaassee.... Should we drive less? That is about to be come an academic topic unless the powers that be quit talking and actually do something to come up with a better energy supply so we can drive as much as we want.

The answer isn't to buy less, consume less, use less, and cut back, the asnwer is to find a better supply so we don't have to cut back!

Reply to
Zootal

Thanks for the resumé.

Charlie

Reply to
Charlie

My resume is much more detailed and intense, and tends to offend and sometimes infuriate those with strong progressive liberal tendancies. This lil' blurb warn't nothin' :-)

Reply to
Zootal

Sorry, I really don't care about your specifics and am not offended, as much as you seem to hope I am offended. Is that your desire, to offend those with "liberal" tendencies? Good luck, George. ;-)

Thanks for playing.

Charlie

Reply to
Charlie

Hmm...I re-read my posts, and I don't see anything that indicates that I hoped to offend you, so I'm not quite sure how you made that connection. I had no such hopes. I don't "hope" to offend those that disagree with me ideologically, but I am aware that it happens. Quite honestly, I neither avoid such a situation, nor do I go out of my way to cause it to happen. It's inevitable for anyone with strong ideological beliefs. I don't apologize for it when it happens, any more then I apologize for what I know and believe.

But what really hurts is when someone says they don't care...I'm cut to the quick...I'm going to eat worms...I might even cry....

Reply to
Zootal

Yup

Reply to
D. Staples

Water goes back into the environment once it's "used". It's not destroyed so it does not matter.

I did not fight my way to the top of the food chain to become a vegetarian. ;-)

Reply to
Omelet

Or do like they do in Arizona... Landscape with rocks and cactus! I'm fixin' to plant a nice cactus patch along my front fence. I have some spineless prickly pear. Tough plants too.

Steak does not make you fat.

Bread (wheat products) and sugar do.

Reply to
Omelet

This is a startling figure. As I suppose it was intended to be. How does one arrive at such a figure? Until you know where it comes from and what assumptions it includes it is hard to say what impact not eating beef, or not eating as much, would have on water consumption.

The USA annual beef production is about 11 million tons which at 2000 gallons a pound equates to about 30% of the water consumption that you quoted. This does seem very high given all the things that need water. However let's assume that it is right and that my sums are correct. What would happen to that water if that amount of beef was not produced? In what way would the world be a different (better) place?

Unless we can describe the consequences of the options it is hard to make a rational decision about how best to live.

David

Reply to
David Hare-Scott

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