How Much Water Does It Take To Make a Pound of Beef? (or: Why You Should Always Sanity Check Your Math) · 8:49pm Jun 1st, 2016
How much water does it take to make one pound of beef, including the water required to grow the food to feed the cow?
If you ask this question of Google, you’ll find a variety of responses:
Vegsource cites a number of numbers, ranging from 2,464 gallons per pound of beef (according to the Water Education Foundation) to 12,009 gallons per pound of beef (according to David Pitmentel, a professor of ecology and agricultural science at Cornell University). PETA closely echoes this claim, at 2,400 gallons per pound, while Treehugger claims 2,500 – 5,000 gallons per pound.
The USGS suggests that a 1/4th pound hamburger takes 460 gallons of water, meaning a pound would be 1840, though it notes that figure with the caveat that a lot of assumptions are built into it and the figure is heavily dependent on how you raise the cow. Other sources, such as the Huffington Post and GRACE, repeat this figure. Waterfootprint.org claims beef requires 15,500 liters per kg of beef, which works out to 1,857 gallons per pound, so is probably the same figure and it is just rounding.
ExploreBeef cites a UC Davis study which put it at 441 gallons of water per pound of beef. James W. Oltjen, who did the study, notes that the amount of irrigated grain makes a huge impact on water use estimates; a cow who eats nothing but non-irrigated food produces beef at the cost of 105 gallons of water per pound of beef, while a cow who eats nothing but irrigated grain rises up to 675 gallons of water per pound of beef. The 441 gallons of water per pound of beef is also echoed by meat mythcrushers and your doctor’s orders.
So, who is right?
The US produced 23.69 billion pounds of beef in 2015 according to BeefUSA; other sources seem to agree with this figure, suggesting it is probably right, or at least very close to correct.
According to the USGS, the US used 355 billion gallons per day of water in 2010. This works out to 129,575,000,000,000 gallons per year (that’s 129,575 billion gallons of water per year).
That’s a lot of water!
Obviously, not all of that water is used for agriculture. Indeed, most of it isn’t:
Overall agricultural use of water in the US constitutes only 115 billion gallons per day for irrigating crops and only 2 billion gallons per day for livestock. Combined, this works out to 42,750 billion gallons of water per year.
Once you compare this to the beef figure, something becomes immediately obvious: almost all of these numbers have to be wrong.
At 12,009 gallons per pound of beef, that would mean that annual US beef production takes 284,493 billion gallons of water per year. This is not only in excess of the amount of water used in the US for agriculture, it is in excess of the amount of water used in the US for everything combined. In fact, it is more than double the total annual use of water by Americans. I sincerely hope that Dr. Pitmentel was misquoted, and this was supposed to be liters per kilogram, as this is obviously idiotic on the face of it, and any sort of sanity check would have instantly revealed it.
But as it turns out, the other figures aren’t much better.
At 5,000 gallons per pound of beef, that would mean total annual water use for beef production was 118,450 billion gallons of water – or over 90% of total US annual water use for all uses.
At 2,500 gallons per pound of beef, that would put total annual water use for beef production at 59,225 billion gallons of water per year – which is still more than the total use of water by American agriculture for all irrigation and livestock combined.
At 1,800 gallons per pound of beef, we’re looking at a total of 42,642 billion gallons of water per year – which is almost exactly identical to the total water use for all American agriculture combined (within rounding distance). This could be coincidence – or it could be the result of some idiot simply taking total US agricultural water use, thinking that was the total used for beef production, and dividing it by the amount of beef produced per year, and then a bunch of other idiots repeating the number without really thinking about it.
At 441 gallons per pound of beef, we’re put at 10,447 billion gallons of water per year used for beef production – roughly 1/4th of total American water use for agricultural purposes. Given the amount of beef produced and consumed in the US, this is, at last, a plausible number – we do grow a lot of other stuff, but we probably do devote a lot of resources to beef production.
So, who is right?
Turns out, the beef industry (and the random medical website) are the only people who present even remotely plausible numbers for the amount of water consumed to produce a pound of beef. And this would have been immediately obvious to the people who were throwing these numbers around had they bothered to spend five minutes and check their math against total US agricultural water use.
Two takeaways:
1) When you calculate a number, or see a number which seems really extraordinary, do a sanity check against a target number to see if your calculated number makes sense.
2) Don’t trust anyone when they tell you how much water it takes to produce any crop, ever. If they’re off by a factor of 4 (or more!) on beef, they’re probably wrong on everything else, too.
Question: are those high numbers trying to account for rainfall? Just off the top of my head, a lot of food cattle eat will receive some some amount of its required water from rainfall. In some situations this can be waved away (how will a cattle farm affect the water use in an average US city?) but would be relevant in others (is it viable to raise cattle in an arid area where water for grass and feed would have to come from a local supply?)
I have no idea if rain watering of plants would be eniugh to account for the difference there, but trying to factor it could account for both the different figures and the fuzziness of the numbers.
I love stuff like this. Although I first learned about it in the context of programming, doing a "sanity check" is just a good way for a rational mind to think. Many misconceptions, some small, some large, could easily be dismissed just by looking at something from a different angle, and seeing if the concept makes absolutely no sense from said angle.
Sadly, some people will hold to their misconceptions no matter what. I had a co-worker that just knew that any drink other than water gave you negative hydration. It didn't matter if it was tea, Red Bull, or moonshine you "needed" to drink at least as much water as you drank of the "dehydrating" fluid to catch up. When I asked her to look at it from the point of view that millions of Americans go days/weeks/months without drinking just plain water, and realize that if her position was true than people would be dropping dead from dehydration in droves, she assured me they must just be eating high water foods...
Anyway, nice post TD, informative and interesting.
There are lies, D*** lies, and statistics.
3990158
The number being cited is supposed to be for water diverted to agricultural purposes; i.e. how much water (which we can put to multiple uses) is being diverted towards crop X or purpose Y for the sake of comparison. Rainfall isn't included in such figures because rain that falls on an area is rain that falls on an area. Depending on where you grow a crop, your "water usage" changes appreciably. If you grow your crop in the desert using water diverted from the Rio Grande, you're "using" more water than if you grow the same crop in Florida just off of rainfall.
This is why Oltjen noted the difference between irrigated and non-irrigated crops - rainfall isn't taken into consideration because you can't divert rain. This also means that if you grow your crop somewhere where you don't have to irrigate it, it won't "use water", whereas if you grow it somewhere where you do have to irrigate it, it does. The more you have to irrigate, the more water you're using.
Obviously, Equestria would count water usage differently.
It is of course possible that the real cause of this is that people took the wrong numbers and applied them to the wrong things - if you need, say, 30 inches of rainfall wherever you want to grow crop X or else you have to irrigate, it would be easy to make some bad calculations based on that. I'm not sure if that's what happened, though; I'd have to go through the other original papers.
If you think about it, it only really takes .75 pounds of water to "make" a pound of beef. The rest of the water that the cattle consumes over it's lifetime is returned to the water cycle to be reused.
Edit: It's more accurately a factor of how much money it takes to properly distribute the water.
My naive assumption here is that they looked at one cow and said things like "well we need to count watering the grass it eats, or the water that the cow's farmers consume while on the job" and other such numbers so that they could get an inflated liters-per-pound number. Things like watering the grass would be a shared cost against the entire farm, so in order to convert that into liters-per-pound, they'd need to split that "tax" across every livestock on the farm, which I assume they did not. That's the only way I can figure they'd be off by such a large factor.
Either that, or they're playing ridiculous degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon here, and including the water consumed by the waitress of the taxi driver of the farmer of the cow... But again, same thing, that water consumption benefits the cows of that farmer, the cows of the neighboring farmer, all of the taxi driver's other customers, etc etc.
Normally I'd blame political motivation, but it doesn't seem like all the sources you listed were from one side of the aisle. You did, however, mention that this fell nicely into buckets, which is likely a result of repetition. For instance, HuffPo directly cites Waterfootprint and Scientific American. I very much doubt HuffPo did their own calculations; they merely gave a ton of visibility to someone else's bad data. And then someone else cites HuffPo...
We live in an era where everyone is a self-proclaimed expert. Fact-checkers are the real heroes.
Bit of a tangent, on that point: My morning alarm turned on some trashy talk radio. They were talking about some town politics issue, and they had the "bad guy" on to do an interview. They grilled him with a couple of questions, to each of which the guest replied, "That's not true. In actuality, blah." The talk show host became indignant. "Sir," he said, "that's twice in a minute that you've called me a liar." Now, I haven't followed the local story and I was barely awake for the interview, so I don't know or care who was right. But it irked me beyond belief that a radio talk show host was acting like a damn expert to events where he was not present and his guest was present. Sure, I don't particularly trust politicians, but I also don't trust the fact-checking department of a "Stevie and The Freak" style of radio show complete with annoying SFX. I had half a mind to call up the station and tell him, "You're not a liar. You're a dumbass. Cite your sources or STFU."
3990194
This is true - we don't really "use" water in any real sense, we're more borrowing it for a while.
However, for practical purposes, we do indeed "use" the water in the sense that water diverted into irrigating fields is no longer flowing down the river (and water dumped into the ocean because we're running our dams isn't being used to grow crops). The water will return via the water cycle, but every cycle ends up beginning and ending somewhere. We effectively have only so much water per year, even though we're reusing it year after year.
3990200
Not to mention the whole telephone thing. Oltjen's paper gives results in liters per kilogram. It would be easy for someone to see the number and instead insert "gallons per pound". 3,682 liters per kilogram is 441 pounds per gallon. His high end estimate of 675 pounds per gallon if you fed them nothing but irrigated grain is closeish to 5,000 liters per kilogram, which may explain that number.
It is entirely possible that all of the numbers were originally liters per kg and were wrongly put as (or badly converted into) gallons per pound. After all, most scientists work in metric, not imperial units. If no one ever bothered to go back and look at the original source, they could repeat the error endlessly.
The 12,009 number is still a mystery, though. It wouldn't surprise me if it was the result of a bad conversion into liters per kg and then someone mistakenly put it as gallons per pound.
3990184 The number being cited is supposed to be for water diverted to agricultural purposes;... (emphasis mine)
Hence, the wild swings in numbers, as what is left unsaid is the underlying meme being pushed: "Meat uses too much water to be justifiable." The veggies throw this at my industry every time a drought comes around (and sometimes during floods, but rarely). The truth of the matter is a cow is a wonderful device for being placed out on otherwise marginal ground to consume wasted vegetative matter and convert it into delicious steaks. Much if not all of the water used in the process is just a hiccup in the water cycle far less damaging than the massive concrete covers of urban sprawl which divert rainfall away from natural aquifer recharging and into flash flooding downstream. So throw away your guilt and fry up some USDA Prime today.
This was actually brought up on the skeptics stackexchange a short while ago, and while I don't remember the details of the answers I do remember that it turns out some of these figures count the most ridiculous things - e.g. all the rainfall across the cow's grazing area during the lifetime of the cow.
Um, yeah.
3990447
Figuring out what foods are most efficient is not simple. Purely grass-fed beef uses less water than apricots on a per-pound basis, let alone on a caloric basis - but even at 441 gallons per pound, that's actually still more efficient than growing apricots on a caloric basis (assuming, of course, you trust the 150 gallons per pound of apricots figure - which, frankly, after doing these calculations for beef, I don't trust at all either).
It depends on how you raise the cow, among other complexities. Obviously, the higher up a food chain a food product is, the less efficient it is - but if the cow is eating grass, that's largely irrelevant, as grass is not something humans can eat. On the other hand, it is more relevant if you're feeding a cow grain, as humans do eat corn and other cereals.
This is a common mistake made by a lot of folks - they've heard about trophic levels but fail to understand that each particular chain is its own. How much water is used to produce anything is not really related to another chain.
A good example of this is almonds. California produces 1.85 billion pounds of almonds per year. This requires 3.29 million acre-feet of water in a year. Thats 1,072,051,200,000 gallons of water per year (note that this is over 2% of all American water used for agriculture in the US in any given year - almonds are thirsty!). This works out to 579 gallons per pound of almonds, which is more than beef!
Note that this is not actually a very inefficient use of water, though - almonds are hilariously high in calories, even compared to beef. 100 grams of almonds contains 576 calories, compared to 250 calories for beef and 48 calories for apricots. A pound of apricots supposedly takes 150 gallons of water, but on a caloric basis, is actually the least water efficient of those three foods.
Someone rather comically did this calculation for lettuce and discovered that 1 calorie of lettuce apparently produced about 3 times the greenhouse gases of 1 calorie of bacon. Of course, this isn't a very good comparison - people don't eat 500 calories of lettuce in a sitting - but it is still kind of amusing.
3990184
I really hope this is a reference to bad horse's second newest story.
3990200 you should have. :P
This is a good analysis, but let's make sure you're not getting your own numbers wrong, or misinterpreting them. Clicking around the USGS website, the livestock use page specifies what the "livestock" category covers:
So this basically covers water that livestock drink (or get showers with). It explicitly doesn't cover water used to produce their food. All cattle food is either (A) lumped in with irrigation (to grow wheat/hay/grass/etc used for feed), or (B) totally invisible on the water charts because it's not a "withdrawal" from a reservoir, it's naturally grown grass. There's a separate argument to be made whether beef figures should count that "invisible" water, but clearly they do: even Oltjen (with the lowest numbers) cites 105 gallons/pound for cows eating exclusively non-irrigated foods; the USGS Livestock category is 730 billion gallons/year for 24 billion lbs of beef, so even with the ridiculous assumption that all that livestock water was exclusively for cows, the maximum contribution of their drinking and shower water is 30 gallons/lb.
So I can't help but feel that, despite this casting doubt on the traditional numbers, there's apples-to-oranges comparisons going on here, and the discrepancies might be explained by a deeper read into the original sources of the estimates.
Another interesting tidbit worth noting, but which doesn't directly touch on your numbers or mine: the USDA says that agriculture accounts for 80 percent of US water consumption, not ~40% as shown in the chart in your post, and on this page they draw some distinctions between the USGS "withdrawals" and actual consumptive use. I don't think it changes either of our arguments, but does illustrate the headache of trying to come at this from a layman's perspective and compare numbers outside of their original context. I'm kinda taking that as a signal here that there's a lot of hidden data confounding any conclusions we might draw based on quick math and "reasonable" assumptions.
3990768
I was summing the irrigation water use (115,000 million gallons per day) and livestock water use (2,000 million gallons per day), for a total of 117,000 million gallons per day, or 42,750 billion gallons of water per year. As we do grow feed that we feed to cows, that would fall under irrigation but not under livestock. This obviously represents an upper limit, assuming we fed cows 100% of what we grew.
One of the major problems is that hydroelectric dams do end up releasing a bunch of water which ends up in the ocean; should that be counted, or not? We don't actually draw the rivers dry (well, hopefully, anyway) because there is a need for water in them for shipping and other things, but some of that water can obviously be used downstream.
Obviously municipal water draws quite a bit but also returns quite a bit to the river.
EDIT: The USDA's charts for 17 western states (ARIZONA, CALIFORNIA, COLORADO, IDAHO, KANSAS, MONTANA, NEBRASKA, NEVADA, NEW MEXICO, NORTH DAKOTA, OKLAHOMA, OREGON, SOUTH DAKOTA, TEXAS. UTAH, WASHINGTON, WYOMING) put total water as 71,851,000 acre-feet, or 23,412 billion gallons, in 2008. Assuming that the other 37 states put together use a similar amount of water (for you non-Americans - geographically, those 17 states make up about half the continental US), that would be roughly consistent with the USGS numbers for overall water used for agricultural purposes of 42,750 billion gallons. So while the USGS and USDA seem to be counting overall water usage differently, their overall numbers for agricultural water usage seem at least comparable.
This is a good point; I'll have to take a closer look at his numbers (as I actually have a copy of his paper) to figure out where that comes from.
3990774 3990768 Don't forget, just because an irrigation pump (in normal circumstances, excluding 'fossil water' such as the Ogallala aquifer here in Kansas) pumps an acre-foot of water over an acre of ground, does not mean that water goes away. A certain percentage of it perks down through the ground over tens or even hundreds of years to recharge the aquifer. Same thing for cow 'wash water' which may then be pumped into irrigation systems, perk down through the soil, and wind up washing a new cow later for multiple 'uses.'
FYI: If you ever want to watch sparks fly, ask a Western Kansas farmer about how Colorado is cheating on their interstate water compacts.
Also makes one wonder how accurate the water usage stuff is. Okay, for city dwellers and such, yeah, you know. And based on that, you can calculate a decent average for people on the whole. But a lot of farms are pulling from sources that aren't metered, be it wells or rivers. Furthermore, water usage will vary based on weather and soil conditions. More rain and you irrigate less. Sandier soil and you'll need to irrigate more often.
And unlike the cow figures, there isn't as much interest in manipulating the figures to push an agenda. Still some, due to water shortages and such, but not as much, and typically more regional than national.
By their very nature, those dams mostly just hold the water up for a while, but then let it pass to power the turbines. Just it changes when the water goes downstream, as opposed to stopping it from going. And while they do build up a reserve, it is typically when there is an abundance of incoming water. So as far as use goes, I'd say only evaporation from the water pooled behind the dam ought to count.
3990768
3990774
The paper doesn't talk about it directly, but also seems to count nothing but water withdrawls, leaving that 105 figure a mystery. Looking at the numbers in the papers, though:
1) Even a cow not eating any irrigated feed may still be in an irrigated pasture. The paper distinguishes between irrigated feed and irrigated pastures, so he might have been in his talk as well.
2) The minimum irrigation for feed was non-zero, so he may have simply been going with minimum values rather than actually "no" irrigated crops, and the page was misquoting him.
3) Many cows in the US come from Holstein feeder cattle; as noted in the paper, while these calves are being raised, but before they're put elsewhere:
This may create a minimum average level of water consumption even if they don't consume much from feed later on.
But this is all WAG, as the paper doesn't go into it.
Interestingly, the paper also notes that runoff from irrigation apparently returns 10-20% of water back to the water supply, so the figure is noted as being somewhat overstated (it cuts the overall water use by about 500 liters per kg, or a bit under 1/7th the total figure), but those returns are not included in the 3,600 liters/kg or 441 gallons/lb figure.
Though to be fair, if you're just comparing metered sources, it would make sense to discount this unless you're discounting it on everything.
3990447 And also worth noting that large livestock herds are beneficial for fighting/reversing desertification.
So if you need/want the animals anyway, might as well have some steaks.
One of the best things about water: It is a non-consumed resource.
By which I mean, the same bit of water can be recycled through the process millions of times, even if it's been used for something else in the process already.
The water used to grow the plants can be reclaimed for the cattle to drink, and whatnot.
3990981 That's not how plants.
Edit; Also, have fun recycling water from, for example, any plant which processes the doping compounds for chip manufacture, or the chromium salts used in cheap industrial tanning.
Sure, you can repurpose it right away if massive outbreaks of heavy metal poisoning are your thing.
The water molecules might be just fine, but getting dangerous things out after putting them in is a non-trivial problem.
3990851 3990865
The difficulty I was trying to get at with my apples-and-oranges post is that there's this fundamental disconnect between metered water sources and overall water usage. All of the USGS/USDA numbers are talking about metered sources. Every single one, including the meat industry's, of the gallons-per-pound measurements appear to be talking about overall usage. Rainfall feeds invisibly into overall usage. Recycling (as Georg notes) feeds invisibly into overall usage. The thing is, it is entirely possible, as far as I can tell, that the "true" value of gallons-per-pound results without contradiction in the apparently nonsensical conclusion of "more water is expended on cows than the US actually uses for all human-driven purposes" — because of the apple of overall usage vs. the orange of metered withdrawals.
Then we get into the difficulty of questions like: what difference does it make if it "actually" takes 10,000 gallons of water per pound of beef, if only 100 of those gallons come from humans sucking water out of reservoirs and aquifers? If we suck 100 gallons out of an aquifer for a pound of steak and 150 gallons out of an aquifer for a pound of peaches (as might be the case, as pointed out upthread), then aren't we being more responsible by eating meat? But, how many of those 9,900 gallons of "otherwise wasted" water might we be able to reclaim and put to human use if we switched to peaches and the usage cost (rather than the withdrawal cost) of peaches turned out to be much lower?
This thread is suggesting to me that the most commonly cited meat numbers are bupkis, but not that we-as-laymen have the data at hand to come up with actual answers. Moving from bad data to ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ is a step forward but it's really not great as a basis for policy nor personal ethics.
Either way, I appreciate the extra research, TD.
Nice post!
I would think the beef industry would already know exactly how much water it takes, because some of these businesses must be big enough to grow their own feed. I'd hope they're being charged for the water. They should have records on how much water they used and how many bushels of whatever that grew, and other records of how many bushels of whatever they fed each cow. Pinging 3990851 for enlightenment on this question.
That seems like the kind of figure that will always be hand-wavingly inaccurate, and that an accurate number might defy logical assumptions.
In one of my thermodynamics classes we did a back-of-the-envelope 'engineering estimate' (ie fancy guess) for the number of freight cars needed to supply a local factory with raw material. The answer was surprisingly big. So surprising, in fact, that one of the class know-it-alls loudly announced how absurd the number was: if it was true, there would be trains on that route every single day (which apparently wasn't the case). The professor, who'd guided us to our answer, simply said that they run the trains at night.
3991309
Generally speaking, when we're trying to make decisions about water use, what we care about is the water that we can actually divvy up - that is to say, water from reservoirs and rivers and similar things. Rain isn't really relevant to the discussion not because rain isn't useful but because rain isn't controllable - if it rains on a field, it will rain on the field regardless of whether it is full of wheat or weeds.
Most diverted water isn't actually metered - agricultural use is based on estimates and extrapolations from the few places where we do meter water use (though metering is increasing as water usage increases because we're trying to figure out exactly how much water we really are using). The USDA/USGS figures are extrapolations, not some summed figure on a spreadsheet of 50 million irrigation ditches in the midwest.
Most of the figures about how much water is being used is based on diverted water numbers - using a different number for beef production would contradict that general trend, and wouldn't lead to accurate comparisons with other agricultural numbers.
There are reasons to know total, overall water input - for instance, knowing whether or not you need to irrigate your crops, and whether or not a certain area is going to be conducive to growing something there. Though we kind of disregarded that in California and just threw water at it, so maybe not.
In reality, knowing water usage for cows probably isn't all that directly useful anyway, because as a direct input into the system, cows are largely irrelevant; however, feed for cows is relevant, so if you're growing, say, corn to feed to cows, knowing how much water you're using on that corn is important, even if knowing overall cow water use isn't really directly meaningful to decision making.
3990873
Just have to remember to simulate migration. Range likes to be left alone for a long time, grazed to the roots, trampled, fertilized, and left alone for a long time again. About every decade, throw in a wildfire.
3991336 Well, as TD/Horizon said earlier, it depends. Trucking/piping water in is only fiscally usable in confinement operations, i.e. feeding grain to a cow a few weeks before slaughter so they're not tough and stringy, because Americans love our beef tender. For *that* the industry can tell you exactly how many gallons per head (depending on temperature, feed, age, humidity, et al..) each individual burger on the hoof runs. Dryland cattle grazing can vary from how many cattle per acre to how many acres per cow, depending on the rainfall and available surface water. Best case in pastures with adequate (for cows, not people) rainfall and spring developments (water tanks waste less water than just drinking out of the creek) you have zero water inputs other than rainfall. Typically, water permits issued by the Bureau of Land Management permit the rancher to do spring and water development on their own dime, thus allowing more cows to be grazed on an allotment (cows won't eat if there's no water to drink, no matter how much grass is there.) It's a win/win proposition, because the BLM ground can support more wildlife with dependable water sources. Normally, this grazing land is completely useless for other purposes without the rancher's inputs.
So in short, cattle grazing does not have *that* great an affect on water available for human consumption. Feedlot operations, though... yes, both in consumption and water quality issues (what goes in, comes out).
3991557
One thing I definitely notice as an immigrant. In Europe, the question of "What's for dinner?" is answered with the vegetable(s). In the US, it is often answered with the meat.
3991557
How do you define "too much meat"?
The US actually consumes slightly more beef than we produce, indicating we have a great deal of demand for it, suggesting we produce about the right amount of meat for consumption.
Meat is a highly nutritious (and tasty!) food.
If you're trying to minimize your footprint, then ROI on calories is a major consideration.
The reality is, of course, that there's nothing wrong with eating and enjoying food. Using resources isn't actually a bad thing; it should just be worthwhile. If people enjoy meat (and they do), then who is to say it is a bad use of resources?
We have water treatment facilities which allow us to recycle that water. Waste is actually pretty efficiently recycled because there's not really much choice; the alternative is horrible sanitation issues. As such, wastewater is actually pretty efficiently cycled.
This is in sharp contrast to irrigation water, which only 10-20% of actually ends up getting recycled to waterways and reservoirs; the other 80% is lost from the cycle.
3991579
That's because the meat dish is almost always the entree (main course in American (and much of Canadian) cuisine), and in American cuisine, we focus on the entree. So if you ask an American what their meal is, they'll start with the main course, and then go through the side dishes and appetizers.
I don't know if other countries do it in a different order, but that's how it is here.
3991584 It isn't different. That's the point. In Europe, the veggies are the main thing. The meat portion will typically be smaller, to compliment the veggies. While here, in the States, it is the other way around. At some point in the future, the US will most likely swap over as well, due to the impact of an increasing population and the rising cost of meat. But we're not at that point yet.
3991625
Vegetables aren't necessarily any more eco-friendly than meat is, actually. A recent study by Carnegie Mellon University indicated that Americans following the USDA dietary guidelines (less meat, more fruits, vegetables, dairy, and seafood) would actually increase American energy use by about 38%, water use by 10%, and greenhouse emissions by 6%.
Fruits and vegetables are low in calories and not particularly efficient as a food source as a result. Fruits and vegetables not only take considerably more water to grow than grains and beans do, but are also much lower in energy density and are more costly and difficult to ship. The study found that fruit tended to have a larger water footprint than anything else in terms of calories:water, and many vegetables are also pretty inefficient.
Dairy on the other hand requires the cows to be fed an irrigated diet of alfalfa and similar foods to make the milk taste good, rather than just having them graze on random grass. And it makes a huge difference - the milk around Bellingham, Washington literally tastes like shit because of the effluent they spray on the fields and then feed to the cows.
If Americans kept the same diet they have today, and simply ate less food, we'd reduce overall use by about 9% (and be less obese).
Naturally, vegetarians threw a snitfit, seeing as the whole "vegetarianism is good for the environment" thing is a big thing for them, but in reality, a lot of it is greenwashing. There are low-impact vegetarian and vegan diets, of course, but they are cereal and legume-based diets, not diets involving lots of fruits, vegetables, and nuts, all of which are much less efficient.
3991714
Eating meat isn't bad for you at all. Really, it doesn't particularly matter what you eat, what mostly matters is how much you eat.
Eat too many calories, you'll get fat.
Americans don't generally eat steak for lunch; steak is generally dinner food. Most lunches that I see people eat contain little to no meat. While fast food almost universally includes meat, what people prepare for themselves food-wise for lunch seems to be quite different - maybe a couple thin slices of lunch meat in a sandwich, or maybe a PB&J, or reheated pasta, or similar things. My mom often packs a salad for lunch.
That's not to say we don't eat meat - we do - but at least in my own experience, most people seem to eat almost all of their meat at dinner, with maybe some at lunch in the form of a sandwich and seldom any at breakfast. They aren't eating 200 g of meat at lunch; maybe half that at most, if that. The only time you eat a substantial amount of meat at lunch is if you eat at like McDonalds or something.
For myself, if I get a half pound of lunch meat, that will last me the whole week for lunch, oftentimes with some left over.
One thing worth remembering when looking at per-capita meat consumption in the US is that it is an average, not what people actually normally eat. More than 1.5% of the population weighs 300 pounds or more. These people probably consume about twice as much food as a 150 pound person does. The average skews higher than the median. Sadly, I can't find numbers on median instead of average meat consumption, possibly because they simply don't exist.
3990981 When we say "water" as a resource, we're referring to water which has 2 properties:
- Purity
- Elevation
Water is worth the relative ease of making it drinkable or safe for crops relative to seawater or sewage, plus the kinetic energy it has by virtue of its elevation. Using its kinetic energy (to force it up pipes or to generate hydroelectric power) leaves its purity intact, but only for crops at low elevation; using it to water crops removes much of its kinetic energy (as much of that water won't flow back to a river, or fall as rain at a higher elevation). Note this means crops planted at high elevation are more expensive, because they deprive us of the water's kinetic energy.
3992770
In my personal experience, vegetarians mostly eat cereals & beans. Rice, tofu, other beans, pasta. I've dated a lot of vegetarians. I don't think any of them liked vegetables. Meals at vegetarian restaurants are mostly tofu, rice, beans, & pasta.
3992809
Controlled dietary studies have consistently failed to find any health advantage to low or no meat diets. This is the problem with a lot of dietary science - it isn't.
Take sodium recommendations. People keep advising people to consume less sodium. But studies have failed to demonstrate that lowering sodium intake lowers mortality rates, and it may actually increase mortality risk.
Vegetarians and vegans are healthier on average than the rest of the population. But putting people on controlled vegetarian or vegan diets and comparing them to people on normal diets fails to show any health benefits to people on vegetarian or vegan diets. The advantage vegetarians and vegans enjoy in observational studies is not because of their diet; it is because vegetarians and vegans tend to be more health conscious, exercise more often, and are less likely to eat excessively and thus end up overweight or obese. The health advantage, then, is not related to diet; indeed, vegans suffer from higher rates of calcium deficiency than would otherwise be expected from similar people, among other nutritional deficiencies. This is because unlike a normal diet, vegetarians or vegans are far more likely to miss out on important micronutrients; meat, by its very nature, contains a lot of stuff our bodies need. Likewise, dairy products are a major source of calcium in the American diet. Missing out on these two things increases your likelihood of missing out on something if you don't eat a reasonable and varied diet. A well-balanced vegetarian or vegan diet is no less healthy than any other diet. But a poorly-balanced one is more likely to result in malnutrition simply because they don't have the default of "meat has at least some of almost everything". Not that you cannot grow malnourished on a meat-containing diet, but it is harder.
Another great example is the recent studies which say people who eat nuts are healthier than those who don't. This makes people think nuts make you healthier. But the real cause is probably the fact that calories are calculated using an archaic system (the Atwater system) which is known to be systematically flawed, but no one has come up with anything substantially better that doesn't require expenses that people aren't willing to put up with. As it turns out, other recent studies have found that many nuts have their caloric content particularly overestimated by the system - almonds have their true calories overstated by it by about 20% relative to what the body actually gets out of them, for instance. This means that what is really going on is that they're comparing people who eat more calories to people who eat fewer calories. Given that the primary cause of poor health due to diet in the US being a result of overeating, all other things being equal, someone who derives a substantial portion of their caloric intake from nuts is going to be consuming less "real" calories than someone who isn't. The person eating fewer calories is likely to be healthier because they're less likely to be overweight or obese.
3993041
I guess no one wants to eat their vegetables.
When I think of vegetarian food, I think of the local restaurant (which frankly I've never really enjoyed), or the vegan place I used to eat at in college which seemed obsessed with peanut butter, raisins, and bananas (which had decent but strange food).
You know vegans/vegetarians a lot better than I do; the vegetarians and vegans I've known well all ended up folding and going back to eating delicious, delicious dead animals after one too many experiments with eggplant (or, in the case of my high school friend, smelling my mom's cooking).