I'm sure most of my readers have grown used to vegetarians vegans anti-meat activists trumpeting that it wastes far too much water to produce a pound, or a kilogram, of beef, compared to just eating vegetables and fruit. Turns out they've been fudging the numbers, to put it mildly.
From Sama Hoole on X:
The crime they see: 15,415 litres of water to produce one kilogram of beef. Every campaign, every documentary, every leaflet through the door since about 2012.
The crime they do: not reading the paper.
The figure is real. It comes from Mekonnen and Hoekstra at the University of Twente, and it is careful, peer-reviewed work. What the campaigns strip out is that the same authors split that number into three parts, because the three parts are not the same thing at all.
Green water is rain. It falls on the grass. The cow eats the grass. For beef, green water is about 94 per cent of that headline.
Blue water is the stuff that matters. Rivers, lakes, aquifers. The stuff that gets pumped, metered, fought over in court, and does not come back.
So here is the blue water, in litres per kilogram, from the same authors, same method, same units.
- Pistachios: 7,602
- Almonds: 3,816
- Walnuts: 2,451
- Dates: 1,250
- Cashews: 921
- Beef: 550
Read that last line again, then go and look at what is in your granola.
The 15,415 counts rain that fell on a Welsh hillside as a cost, against an animal that was standing in it, on land where nothing else grows, in a country where rain is the one thing we have never once been short of.
The pistachio is drinking fourteen times more of the water that actually runs out.
I've no doubt the "greenies" will object that most of the rainwater runs off and feeds their vegetables, so it's by definition "greener" than beef anyway: but that's splitting nutritional hairs, IMHO. I'll continue to favor a carnivore diet, thank you very much!
Peter
All that as it may be, there is a huge fallacy being used as the foundation to this. The myth that water is 'used up'. It's not, not at all. It simply moves through the ecological system, becoming rain, ground water, rivers, oceans, and always cycling through. Unless we crack the water into Hydrogen and Oxygen or fling it into space it's still here.
ReplyDeleteWhat the whacko Tribe is upset about is not 'wasting' water and their leadership knows it. What they hate, deep in their souls, is not being in total control of who gets water and who doesn't. That is the beginning, body, and end of their concern.
They lie. We know they lie. They know we know they lie. And yet they continue to lie.
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely true. The left is nothing but liars. Repubs do it too.
DeleteCarteach: I think an important point is that the aquifers cannot recharge quickly enough to avoid running out of pumped water. Why, yes, I would like a steak, thank you. Broccoli and a baked potato, too, please. With extra butter and sour cream.
ReplyDeleteIt takes an average of 25 years, hundreds of thousands of education debt and tons of water to produce a highly educated lunatic. Like the one that produce studies like this. No one admits they are willing to eat the vegan lunatic. So It is reasonable to keep the food and get rid of education as it exists today and the lunatics it produces.
ReplyDeleteMy beef comes from the farmer, I buy direct (he handles the butchering, etc.) I see the field the cows live in. They are born on that farm in the barn at the bottom of the field. They drink from the pond and stream that are there, eat the grass as it grows. When they are 18-20 months old, the farmer takes them to the butcher, and 2 weeks later a guy like me hands him a wad of 100's.
ReplyDeleteI dunno what new-math liberals use, but.... there's no extra water used to make my beef, than what the good Lord decides to put on the ground it grows up on.
Since I'm not supposed to eat nuts, I'm good with the beef! :-)
ReplyDeleteYeah, at this point it is not socially accceptable to just eat the vegans and those other nuts.
ReplyDeleteBut I do still have my first edition copy of "To Serve Man" for when that time comes. :-)
John in Indy
Just another instance of "Lies, damn lies and statistics"...
ReplyDeleteI'm skeptical of vegetarians, but can tolerate them, if they are dedicated and generally hold to it as a personal preference, rather than something to be pushed. Vegans, on the other hand annoy me. Having said that, I am ~trying~ to add more vegetables and reduce meat (a little) in my weekly diet. The reason is I am getting more and more suspicious of the quality of meats in the market. The factory farms load them up with who-knows-what chemicals, "vaccines" and hormones. I'm suspicious of that. I suspect that a lot of "weird" health effects that are being seen in our society lately may stem from stuff in the food we eat....but what do I know? I applaud the commenter above who has teamed with a local farmer, sees the animals daily and knows what is going into them. They have a good life and then one bad day...that's the way it should be.
ReplyDeleteIt isn't a bad day as that is what G*d intended them for. I like the idea of giving thanks for the animal when it goes on to serve its intended purpose.
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