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
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
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