It’s hard to believe that it’s been over a month since we started doing this EcoAction project. At the beginning it felt like my food habits were so ingrained that it didn’t even make sense to try to analyze them and subsequently change them. But it turned out that the hardest parts were researching and calculating the water footprint of my diet; once I’d make the decision to cut out the most water-intensive foods I ate, it was actually pretty simple to adjust.
I’ve started to look more closely at how the “meat substitutes” (as I’ve termed them in my head) that I’m eating compare to each other. To my surprise, when I researched it I found that chickpeas take a lot more water to produce (608.6 gallons per 8 oz) than soy (174.7 gallons per 8 oz), and both of those actually take more water to produce than eggs (93.8 gallons per 8 oz) (Kim, Schleuss, & Krishnakumar, 2015). Although in my baseline week I ate way more eggs than chickpeas or soy, making it the right choice to cut out of my diet, it was still interesting to see the comparison. In the future I will try to move away from eating chickpeas and eat starches that have a lower water footprint instead, such as sweet potatoes, yams, and squash.
Throughout this project I’ve become exponentially more aware of what me and other people around me are eating. Although I feel that my friends and I are mindful about our food choices, it seems to be in a very narrow sense; we don’t put thought toward what we eat beyond whether it’s healthy/tasty/cheap- essentially, beyond any personal impact our food choices have. I think that partly stems from being in such a privileged situation where everything being so easily accessible makes it seem like it took the same amount of work or resources to reach you. I’m glad to have expanded my perspective, and thinking about the entire system connected to the food I eat has made me think about the systems in other aspects of my life as well.
References
Kim, K., Schleuss, J., & Krishnakumar, P. (2015). 351 gallons of water were used to make this plate. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved from http://graphics.latimes.com/food-water-footprint/
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
Reducing Our Food's Water Footprint 