Virtual Water
I read an interesting article yesterday about a concept called “Virtual Water” in the online Discover Magazine. Virtual water is the estimated amount of water it takes to produce any food or product from start to finish. For example, a cup of coffee is much more than 12 ounces of water. To grow, process, deliver and make one cup of coffee actually requires 37 gallons of water. For one cup! It takes 155 pounds of water to grow one pound of wheat. That’s almost 20 gallons. An apple uses 19 gallons of water. A sheet of paper needs 3 gallons. And a pair of leather shoes use a whopping 4400 gallons of water. Surprisingly, the production of meat takes five to ten times more water than the production of vegetables. So the manufacturing of animal-related goods is quite demanding of water.
What does all of this mean? Well, there is a limited amount of usable fresh water in the world. Farming, irrigation and manufacturing water usually ends up in the ocean, which means used and wasted fresh water is not easily returned to our reservoirs where we need it. Technology is not yet in place to handle the water needs of the world through desalination of sea water. Therefore, wasting food, is wasting water. Wasting anything is wasting water, more than you can ever conserve around your house through shorter showers or shutting off the faucet while brushing your teeth.
Five million, that’s 5,000,000 people, die every year from lack of water or clean water. One third of those people are children under the age of five. In time these numbers will increase. The amount of water needed to feed the world’s growing population is potentially unavailable unless water is properly shared; unless companies and countries can allocate fresh water for agriculture only where it is ample. Companies like Nestle and Coca Cola are very interested in “virtual water” and looking for solutions. We all can help. We can all start right now by not being wasteful. Eat less meat; don’t waste food or goods. It’s that simple.