Eat Less Water

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English

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North American (General)

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the most far reaching, effective strategy to save water is to eat less of it. Realizing this is what led me to start reading labels and replacing your family's favorite brands have conventionally raised food with organic alternatives. The transition went largely unnoticed by my kids until my changes in the menu reached the serial shelf in the kitchen pantry. Where's my cornflakes? My seven year old daughter, Isabella, demanded. I got us some new cereals to try. I showed her the choices. What's wrong with the kind? We always eat? The's air better for water, I answered, pointing to the USDA Organic seal water. It's not like cornflakes come soggy. She draped food grown without chemicals, Safe's freshwater more than any other water saving strategy. Now I had her confused, an improvement over defiant. She had heard the story about the drops of water saving my father's life, and she'd watch migraine passion to conserve water. Take over the house. It had led to my starting up, a small business distributing shower timers. Isabella, as the eldest of three, had joined me at Earth Day events and trade shows. She helped me cover portable tables with blue cloth and Stech star and duck shape shower timers in neat displays. She had listened to me rattle off statistics. You can save 2500 gallons of water in one year, I told people. Together we sold 80,000 shower timers. Isn't taking shorter showers enough? Isabella moaned. Still yearning for her old cornflakes, I explained that my focus on the shower had been misguided. The same amount of water saved over the course of a year in the bathroom can be saved in a week in the kitchen because seven out of every 10 gallons of water is used for food production. I had been focusing on the wrong room of the house. A pound of beef has a virtual water footprint of 1851 gallons. Virtual water isn't directly visible in food products, but the concept captures the total amount of water required to produce food. The virtual water footprint of beef represents not just the water a cow drinks but also the water used to grow all the grain or grass consumed by the average cow. Over its lifetime. A loaf of bread has a virtual water footprint of 425 gallons, representing the water required to grow and harvest the grain. These air simplified descriptions of complex algorithms researchers used to calculate water footprints. The United Nations reports. Each American eats between 531,300 gallons of virtual water every day. The water footprint of the United States is more than twice that of any other nation. Of course, the water required to grow food doesn't disappear. Water's ability to change state from solid liquid and gas allows for its endless movement around our planet. When water is drawn from underground aquifers to irrigate crops, the water isn't gone. But through evaporation and runoff, as much as 50% of the water pumped to the surface moves on. When the water moves away faster than it gets replaced, farmland eventually becomes parched and deserts spread. That's happening now, leaving more than one billion people and counting without sufficient water