I saw an ad for being vegan saying either don’t flush your toilet for 6 months, don’t shower for 3 months or don’t eat a burger once. But isn’t all of our water basically renewable and no matter if we do any of these things, it just goes back into the water cycle and we’ll reuse it eventually, even if we have to clean it somehow? What’s the big deal?
In: Earth Science
Water is, however the rain doesn’t always fall where it is needed and there is a very limited amount of freshwater available, in some instances the water to feed cattle or other farming uses comes from underground water supplies called aquifers which used water stored thousand of years ago. https://youtu.be/xbUfVLxYVcE
yes, water doesn’t go anywhere. but it still makes sense to conserve it.
it costs money and energy to treat water and bring it to people. in some places, where there isn’t a lot of rain or fresh water sources, it costs a great deal of money and energy, and they therefore have to deal with water shortages.
and only a tiny fraction of water on earth is easily processed into drinking water. ocean water is expensive to desalinate.
water isn’t really the limiting factor. money is.
Water can be renewed, but that requires energy. Water treatment plants use a lot of energy to make sewage into drinkable water again.
Nature can do some of the work, but it does so more slowly than we need, and because of that we are fouling more and more of nature and making it less effective at the water cycle every day.
So the big deal is that we either need to spend much more money to purify water, we need to use less water, or we need to be prepared to die as a civilization because we refuse to do either of those two. And of course, that also applies to a lot of other environmental concerns as well.
What it means is that from rearing the animal, to slaughtering it, processing it that 1300 gallons of water is used.
So there is water used for drinking water, and water to grow the grass that the animal grazes on, and water to grow other foods it eats, water used to wash and clean the animals living area.
When the animal goes to slaughter, water is used to clean the animal pre and post processing and water used to clean the processing plant.
The big deals to the anti meats/ reduce meat consumption is that non meat based diets use significantly less water to produce food.
Water is renewable, but the way it currently gets “renewed” is limited in capacity.
As you said, human survival today depends on the natural water cycle; plus hacks that we’ve added to it, such as dams and reservoirs. But in a lot of places (the American West, for instance), we capture so much of the water cycle that we have to take care that we’re leaving enough water for the fishes and ducks. Some rivers are entirely diverted for human use and don’t reach the ocean any more.
The natural water cycle is literally not enough for all the things that creative humans want to do with water. We like growing crops (some of which we feed to cows), watering our gardens, and brewing beer; and we also like having fishes and ducks around. This is not a future problem; it is a now problem that lots of people are actively working on.
Because water *is* limited, farmers and ranchers pay for their water. Some agricultural company paid for the water to grow the soybeans that went into the cattle feed that was fed to the cow that became your hamburger. If water became *more* limited, the price would go up, and so would the price of the burger. And if burgers got more expensive, fewer people would choose to eat them as often.
In other words, we already have a system in place to decide how much water gets used by cattle ranchers, and farmers who grow cattle feed, and so on. That system is the market economy, plus taxes and subsidies and environmental laws to protect the fishes and ducks. We know how to adjust it; it’s called *politics* and it is usually a big bunch of no fun.
Want less water usage for agriculture? Tax it. However, the effect is that *all* the food, *including the vegan food,* gets more expensive. The animal-based food gets *more* more expensive, but the plant-based food goes up too. Also make sure to add something for the food banks, because higher prices hit the poorest hardest.
(That may not satisfy the vegan activist group, who maybe really just wants you to hug a cow and not eat it.)
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> if we have to clean it somehow?
That’s the point. Cleaning the water takes energy, requires building big complexes, and hiring people to drive in and work the machinery. All of these things can be damaging to the environment.
It means they are manipulating you with lies.
Beef cows spend most of their time on pastures. (They are kept in feedlots at the end to fatten, but generally, it’s just much more practical and cheaper to let them graze on their own).
The water those cows “use” is just rainwater on the pasture. It isn’t being used at all, it is drunk by the cow, then pissed away the next hour, then soaked into the ground. No different than rain soaking into the ground directly. This water doesn’t disappear, it stays in the system.
What’s more, water is only a valuable commodity (and should be conserved as such) where it’s scarce. Those places can’t and don’t raise cattle anyway. Even if the number was correct, why would you care if so much water was being used in Scotland or New Zealand where it always rains, anyway?
No beef farmer ever takes water from thirsty people to give it to cows. It would be way too expensive and farmers aren’t that stupid. They raise cattle in places where rain is plentiful. The whole process is close to the way wild ruminants graze land because it’s just cheap to let cows loose and let them be cows.
We aren’t really worried about “using up” all our water. They’re giving you a simple way to compare consumption habits of meat vs other activities/food. People understand what a gallon of water looks like. People don’t understand what a metric ton of CO2 in our atmosphere looks like. People offer these metrics to you so you can make a more informed decision about your wastefulness. Some activities are more wasteful than others and meat happens to be a food option that requires more energy and water than others.
They are accounting for the water used to grow cow’s food, the water used for gasoline refinement for the vehicles the farmers use to plow fields for cow food or cows themselves, the water used in gasoline refinement that is used to ship the cows food, the water the cows drink, the water used in gasoline refinement so ship and produce any antibiotics or medicine the cow uses, the water used in gasoline refinement to ship the cow to a slaughtering plant, the water used in any process of the slaughtering plant, and the water used in gasoline refinement for shipping it to your grocery store.
You can use this to compare meat from a grocery store to meat from a local butcher. Using a locally raised, locally butchered cow removes all of the transportation-water because less gasoline is used. You can also use it to compare the water usage for eating only the original vegetables the cow was going to eat. Or compare store bought veggies to veggies from a nearby farm or your own backyard. It’s sort of like a quick and easy way to judge how environmentally conscious your decisions are, not really about the water running out.
Depending on where you are from, clean fresh water is probably readily available and highly renewable. This is not the case in most third world countries, or certain parts of the US or other countries when we have droughts, which are more common as global warming ramps up. Keep in mind that the activities I listed above that use water (tilling extra land for cows and the large amount of crops they eat, refining gasoline which is burned and creating CO2, the energy used for cleaning wastewater etc) are objectively bad for the environment, and further global warming even more.
If the analogy with water doesn’t make sense to you, try looking up differences in CO2 during production, or the total amount of energy needed to produce meat vs other diet option. In short, they used water because they had limited space in their ad, its a quick and easy way to compare the wastefulness of different products, and people can easier visualize a gallon of water than other more meaningful measurements
For places that get their drinking water from wells/aquifers, the water cycle can actually take thousands of years to complete. Most of the central U.S. where most of the cattle stocks are gets it’s water from aquifers that take thousands of years to replenish and are being drained at a much fastee rate.
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