Water
How much water to produce a pound of beef

From the book ... Ecological Integrity: Integrating Environment, Conservation and Health (Island Press, Washington DC, 2001) edited by David Pimentel

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

How Much Water to Make One Pound of Beef?

March 1, 2001 -- To date, probably the most reliable and widely-accepted water estimate to produce a pound of beef is the figure of 2,500 gallons/pound. Newsweek once put it another way: 'the water that goes into a 1,000 pound steer would float a destroyer.'

Not surprisingly, the beef industry promotes a study that determined, using highly suspect calculations, that only 441 gallons of water are required to produce a pound of beef.

(The cattlemen's study applied liberal deductions from water actually used, reasoning that water was evaporated at points during the process, or was 'returned' to the water table after being used to grow plant feed, or was returned to the water table via urea and excrement from cows. Thus, study authors reasoned these waters were not 'lost' but 'recycled' and therefore could be subtracted from gross amount of water actually used in beef production. Of course, evaporation and cow dung don't go very far in replenishing water pumped from acquifers which took thousands of years to fill. It's interesting to consider that if the same fuzzy math were applied to calculating how much water it takes to grow vegetables, potatoes would probably only require about 2 gallons of water per pound.)

Bestselling author and vegetarian trailblazer John Robbins has examined in detail a variety of estimates and who worked on them, and some of his observations are in his new book Food Revolution

So what's the beef with beef, when it comes to water?

Simply put: it's wasteful and irresponsible to squander our precious resources on a luxury item like meat.

The only question we're left with is: just how wasteful and irresponsible is it?

Once again, our intrepid investigator, John Robbins, recently uncovered some startling new evidence. That evidence comes in the form of a scholarly new book which sheds new light on the subject. Edited by David Pimentel and others and published in January, the book is titled Ecological Integrity: Integrating Environment, Conservation and Health (Island Press, Washington DC, 2001).

Pimentel is a celebrated professor of ecology and agricultural science at Cornell University, who has published over 500 scientific articles, 20 books and overseen scores of important studies.

The other editors of the book are Laura Westra, professor of environmental studies at Sarah Lawrence College, and Reed Noss, president and chief scientist for Conservation Science, Inc., and president of the Society for Conservation Biology.