Hannah- Second Update

As we go further and further into this project, I’ve learned a lot about how much water it takes to produce food and why it makes such a huge difference in conservation efforts. And the urgency of this project becomes even more clear as I do more research about how increasing pressure is being put on our limited renewable supply of freshwater, and how our global water footprint has exceed sustainable levels in some places already,

It’s still been hard to conceptualize the impact my food choices have. I’ve found that by cutting chicken, eggs, yogurt, nuts, and chocolate out of my diet, I’ve reduced my food water footprint by 4,566 liters per week, although that doesn’t take into account the water footprint of the foods I’ve replaced those ones with. However, that is a huge number (almost too hard to wrap my head around), and it’s easy to realize that it makes an enormous difference over a month or a year or a lifetime.

Knowing quantitatively how much less water I’m using through this project has been a huge motivator to continue doing it. Although it was difficult to adjust my food habits at first, as the project goes on it has become much easier to adapt to not eating the foods mentioned above. The biggest change I’ve made to stick to my project plan is that I now almost exclusively eat at VG’s and get food from the cafeteria salad bar.

I also recently found a helpful interactive tool produced by the LA Times  (http://graphics.latimes.com/food-water-footprint/) and having been using it to explore how much water it takes to produce the rest of the foods in my diet.

Here are some of the resources I’ve used to measure my water footprint:

(Image source: www.healthwaysblog.com)

(Image source: www.latimes.com)

References

Mekonnen, M. M., & Hoekstra, A. Y. (2010). The green, blue and grey water footprint of farm animals and animal products (Main Report No. 48). UNESCO-IHE. Retrieved from https://waterfootprint.org/media/downloads/Report-48-WaterFootprint-AnimalProducts-Vol1_1.pdf