Where water go? BRing iT bAcK

In the United States eating meat is common, and it is totally okay that you have no idea where your food came from but also completely okay to disregard the life that used to radiate from the "food" that sloshes around in your mouth.

In the end, you can't really push your ideas onto other people, but the best you can do is try to inform others and hope they make the better decision. Sure, meat might taste good to some, but it is not sustainable. Especially in a world where we neglectfully spew greenhouse gases into our atmosphere, and waste resources on a massive scale without a second thought, we will not live very long on this planet unless we learn how to take care of it, and share its resources (and possibly treat animals and other humans as sentient life rather than a valuable commodity).

Currently we are in a severe drought, with less than a years of water left (last time I checked). People don't seem to realize how serious this really is. Everywhere I continue to see people leave sprinklers flooding yards, restaurants with water misters running for hours on a cold day, and people taking hour long showers. It's as if people around here have some sort of death wish, or just love digging themselves into a deeper hole. What's the big deal with eating meat? Like, does it really significantly contribute to the California drought?

To be honest it is kind of shocking exactly how much water you need in the meat industry. First, you need water to grow and maintain the pasture that the animals feed off of (147 gallons to produce one pound of corn. Cows can eat 1000 lb or more over a few months), then you need water to support the animals for drinking but also cleaning. Then you need even more water to process the meat and for all that good stuff most people don't have the guts to see, but the audacity to ignore. When it comes down to it, industrialized countries that make the switch towards a vegetarian diet can reduce their food-related water footprint by up to 36%. 

But how much water is used in everything you eat? That's still hard to accurately pinpoint, but the image on the left gauges about how much water you need for a single Cheeseburger. It's more surprising if you think about exactly how many cheeseburgers are eaten everyday in California alone. BUT don't forget. 

Here in America, land of the "free", we are efficient, we are productive, and we are industrialized. The reality is that we are (at least partly) a nation of factory farming. We don't make cute individual burgers for every individual person who orders them. We make everything in bulk. A single loaf of bread is about 240 gallons of water (indiv. burger tops 11 gallons), while a pound of cheese is about 382 gallons. Now that alone seems like a lot of wasted water. But we haven't even gotten to the best part yet. One SINGLE pound of beef amounts to, on average, a grotesque 1,600 gallons of water. WHAT?

No wonder we're in a drought. Water footprint, though, is not the only negative implication from factory farming. Not only are the animals abused and inhumanely killed, but the workers who operate in the factories in slaughter houses are in terrible working conditions and are treated unfairly by those who run these places. The food itself harms your body. That fact alone should be reason enough to switch diets, but some people need more convincing than that which I believe is completely ridiculous. If your eating habits support the genocide and slavery of multiple species of animals, are taking up all your water, are destroying the environment YOU live in, and all while harming your body, don't you think it might be time to change?