Thursday is the United Nation’s annual World Water Day, and this year, the UN has chosen to focus on agricultural water consumption. This is because approximately 70% of our global water usage goes into growing food—and there are now 7 billion of us to feed.
I care a lot about water—maybe because my father was a microbiologist who dedicated much of his career to water disinfection, maybe because I learned to swim almost before I learned to walk. Maybe because I have spent so much of my life living near oceans and lakes and rivers, watching them change with the seasons, watching the life they support. Maybe because water connects every human who has ever lived on this Earth to every other human who has lived, and currently lives, and will live.
Water is a closed system, which means that every time you turn on the faucet or dive into a swimming pool, you are interacting with the same water that has been on the planet since life itself. You wash your hair with the same water in which the dinosaurs swam, you drink the same water Shakespeare drank. It’s magical and strange and wonderful to think about.
And global water issues affect every single one of us, whether or not we think they do. Less than 3% of the Earth’s water is fresh, which means that even though our continents are surrounded by water, we actually have very little to drink. Of that 3%, much is polluted with environmental or human contaminants—giardia, cholera, microbes of all sorts, arsenic, pollution. Which leaves us even less to drink, to use to grow food.
And global water issues are heavily gendered—where water is scarcest, the job of finding it is almost always left to women and girls. In some places, women spend 8 hours a day finding and carrying water. And girls who must help their mothers find water don’t go to school, don’t learn to read or write. Which means that cycles of poverty and gender inequality continue into another generation.
And global water issues are heavily classed—the poorest suffer the most. Even in the United States, the people with the least access to water, the most heavily polluted water, or even no water at all, are always the poorest.
But back to agriculture, a major drain on our global water supply. My friend and water soul mate Florencia Ramirez lists these facts on her site eatlesswater: 1800 gallons of water go into the production of one pound of beef—from growing the grain that feeds the cattle, to providing water for the cattle, to the water usage in the slaughter and butchering of that cattle. One pound of cheese? 600 gallons of water. Even something seemingly innocuous like coffee uses 37 gallons of water—just to produce one cup!
I try not to be judgmental about other people’s food choices—I spent many years as a younger person lecturing people in supermarkets and during dinner about what they ate. And I’m pretty sure all that lecturing didn’t win me any converts. But the truth is that producing vegetables and fruit—even grain that we eat instead of grain that we feed to livestock—is much less water intensive than producing meat. There’s no way around it—the water footprint of an apple is 18 gallons, a slice of bread, 11 gallons. Nothing, really, compared to the 1800 gallons used to produce one pound of beef.
So this Thursday, I would like to
issue a challenge: in servic
e of World Water Day, in solidarity with the 1 billion people globally who don’t have access to clean water, in a gesture of support to the millions of women and girls who spend the majority of each day just finding and carrying water, eat no meat.
Although it may sound like a minor thing, including even one vegetarian or vegan day every week can have a significant impact on our global water consumption. One day a week of eating pasta or stir-fry or salad can literally save hundreds of gallons of water. And if enough of us joins together in giving up meat for one day, think of the many thousands, millions, billions of gallons of fresh water we could save. That could be used to grow more food to feed more people. That could be used to keep us alive and thriving just a little longer on this planet.
Planet of the Blind 