Blogosphere Doodlings - DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH OF OUR WATER YOU ARE WASTING WHEN YOU EAT!!!! - Granite Grok

Blogosphere Doodlings – DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH OF OUR WATER YOU ARE WASTING WHEN YOU EAT!!!!

Over at TreeHugger is a post where the authoress, Katherine Martinko, has decided that having a carbon footprint is not a sufficiently heavy hammer to use on the rest of us “unenlightened” to get us to change our ways (or have Government change our ways for us).  Nope, now she is adding another hammer: water footprint.  How much that you consume uses up our precious water – you selfish person, you!

…Beverages:

  •  1 gallon (3.8 litres) of milk requires 880 gallons (3,331 L) of water.
  • 1 gallon of wine requires 1,008 gallons of water.
  • 1 gallon of coffee requires 880 gallons of water. “If everyone in the world drank a cup of coffee each morning, it would ‘cost’ about 32 trillion gallons (120 billion cubic metres) of water a year.”

… 

Grains:

  •  1 pound (0.5 kg) of wheat requires 132 gallons (500 L) of water. “Wheat production accounts of 12 percent of global water use for the planet’s total agricultural crop production.”
  • 1 pound of rice requires 449 gallons of water.

Meat:

  • 1 pound of beef requires 1,799 gallons of water.

You get the idea: consume-shaming (like fat-shaming, energy-shaming, conservative-shaming…).  Making you feel bad for taking a bite of that burger or even eating at all.

While we can’t stop buying food altogether, it is possible to make consumer choices that limit the amount of water used to maintain our lifestyle. Go vegetarian, or at least opt for less wasteful meats, such as goat. Order a soy burger instead of beef. Drink water straight from the tap instead of coffee, tea, or orange juice. Don’t buy that extra cotton T-shirt.

Except, if I did what she is trying to command us to do, I’d have no lifestyle at all.  Or even be able to blog (“Do you know how much water, energy, and landscape spoilage it takes to make that laptop you’re using??”).  Or, in the case of some other stats she threw up (appropriate metaphore, eh?), you don’t need that extra t-shirt.  One, perhaps two should be enough.  After all, poverty is best for the Earth!

Keep in mind that water scarcity affects 2.7 billion people worldwide for at least a month each year. Water should not be treated as disposable. It’s a privilege, and deserves great respect because, without it, we cannot survive.

A privilege?  Really?  A privilege is something for which we need to ask permission to do (or consume, in this case).  Worker to boss?  Peer to peer?  Or subject to Government.  Driving is a privilege…but drinking and eating?  Really?  This one, Katherine Martinko, seems to be of the mind that having Government be in charge of that “to save the Earth!” – these are the Watermelon Environmentalists – spouting “Green!” but using totalitarian means to achieve it.

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