Guardian - The Massive Scale Of UK's Water Consumption

[wildcatstrike]

Found this completely by accident, but it's quite interesting and mentions that diets without meat use far less water. There's also an interview with the World Wildlife Fund's water footprint expert you can listen to where the questioner mentions vegetarian diets. Obviously he doesn't go on record saying he thinks people should become vegetarians, as if a massive wildlife or environmental organisation would say that

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environmen...20/water.food1

This 2nd link is a good little picture slideshow of different foods with info on the volume of water needed to produce them. Mentions at least 4 types of meat, plus eggs. Good info to have handy! (NB - as if the majority of pigs are farmed in the way their image shows! laughable. almost.)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environmen...ture=336718185

[fiamma]

Apparently Italy is one of the most wasteful countries in the world in terms of water - 215 litres per head per day (I guess that includes industrial use) Sometimes this "bel paese" frustrates me so much.

[Jiffy]

Excellent link. I passed this onto a friend of mine. He eats meat but claims to care about the environment. This was his reply

Of course, the meat figures are partially ameliorated by the fact that animals would still exist, even if everyone became vegetarian, and so some of the water costs for animals are for the sake of their own survival, and not just owing to their being eaten by us! (As opposed to say, rice, which could be substituted for something else with a lower 'cost'. You don't have to grow rice, but you do have to have animals on the planet, although I admit not as many as intensive farm requires. Do you have any figures of the % of animals there would be on Earth if everyone went vegetarian?)

Why do people deliberately miss the point to such a degree? I don't think it is even worth responding to.

[wildcatstrike]

The millions of animals farmed for meat WOULD'NT exist if everyone became vegetarian. Two and a half million animals are killed for meat everyday in the UK alone. If people stopped eating meat we would'nt have anywhere near that amount of animals to feed and water. Does he think farmers would just keep the animals as pets and look after them until they died of old age? I would imagine that if people stopped eating meat all of a sudden, the last "batch" of animals being farmed for meat currently would be slaughtered and used up and then there would be no more farmed animals, meaning much less water would be used for producing the nation's food.

Also, surely alot of the water used by producing meat is used up on the slaughtering and meat processing side of things, cleaning up of blood, waste, washing the meat etc.

Everyone isn't going to go veg overnight though. However, if your friend becomes vegetarian his own PERSONAL water footprint will be reduced. Whether the animals he would've eaten remain alive and continue to use water doesn't matter. His own PERSONAL use of water for HIS lifestyle would be reduced.

His arguement is interesting, but pointless. It's like saying, "Well, the plane flying from England to USA is going to produce the same amount of CO2 whether i'm sat in the seat or whether there's a seat going spare, so i may as well go on holiday! i'm still an environmentalist! Yay me!"