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This post comes to us from Kai Olson-Sawyer, the Water Program Manager at H2O Conserve. For more information on water conservation, water education, and to check your “water footprint,” go to www.h2oconserve.org.

When you think about food, do you think about water? As more people question where their food comes from, how is it grown, fed, and handled, whether or not it was genetically engineered, and so on, it’s also time to think about how water factors into food production.

At first glance, it doesn’t seem like a big deal. Health food stores, food coops and grocery stores are stocked with an abundance of vegetables, meats and organic roasted vegetable pizzas, creating the impression that there must be water enough to produce this bounty. What we don’t see at the store, though, is what’s called “virtual water,” the vast amount of water that goes into goods and services we buy everyday, including every bit of food we buy.

Surprisingly, the virtual water in our food makes up the overwhelming majority of our “water footprint,” (the aquatic equivalent of our carbon footprint, or our carbon “foodprint.”

Consider just a few examples of water footprints for common foods. For instance, a study by agronomist Herb Schulbach shows that it takes 23 gallons of water to produce one pound of lettuce and another 23 gallons for one pound of tomatoes. That’s a soggy salad. Carrots require 33 gallons of water per pound, and apples 49 gallons. As for your morning cup of coffee, that takes nearly 37 gallons to make, on average, and each slice of toast takes about 10 gallons of water to produce. The reason why each of these products’ water footprint is so big is because the calculation includes the water necessary to grow the crop through rain and irrigation, what’s needed to wash the produce, the water used to cool machinery in electricity generation, as well as the water it takes to produce the fuel to transport them.

It’s not all about the veggies though. Some of the foods with the biggest water footprints are animal products like milk, cheese, and meat. To bring a 7 ounce glass of milk to your table takes about 50 gallons of water. A quarter pound of cheese takes 330 gallons to produce. But the real water hog – excuse me, water cow – is beef: a pound of ground hamburger meat can take more than 5,000 gallons to produce, mostly due to the tremendous amount of grain factory-farmed cows eat, which is grown with huge amounts of water pumped from rapidly depleting aquifers.

Processed foods have a huge water footprint, too. While it is currently difficult to measure all the water that goes into making processed foods, water-conscious groups are developing ways to track and assess their water footprint. When you think about it, however, it’s obvious that processed foods use gobs of water to produce, including growing, washing and transporting the ingredients, followed by processing in factories that use vast amounts of water to cool power machinery and generate electricity to do that processing. Then, there’s the packaging, which often involve petroleum-based plastics, which use even more water to manufacture, and shipping the food worldwide using even more water-processed petroleum. In fact, it takes between two and three gallons of water to process one gallon of gas. All of this means that eating more locally grown, minimally-processed food is a good way to reduce our water footprint, as is eating less meat, and opting for products from pastured animals when you do.

No matter what we do, no matter what we eat, we will always have a water footprint. The point here is that being conscientious about sustainable food also means being conscious about the important part water plays in the cycle of sustainability. Reducing your water footprint can mean just continuing along the already sensible sustainable food path by eating more fresh local vegetables and whole foods, avoiding processed foods, cutting back on animal protein, eating leaner, pasture-raised meat instead of factory farmed meat, and generally not wasting food.

So next time you’re at the market, just ask yourself, “How wet is my food?”

water, conservation, sustainability, food, local food, sustainable food, virtual water, h20 conserve, kai olson-sawyer