Marina – Third Update

November already! I can’t believe that it’s been over a month since we began our project. I’ve been finding the past couple of weeks fairly easy to stick to the majority of my diet changes on a day to day basis. Since I eat and make most of my meals at home, it’s been easy to omit products like cheese, nuts, yogurt and chocolate from my grocery list and that has effectively removed them from my diet. Given this, I’d like to make the following additional changes for these last few weeks of the project:

1. Choose tea over my morning coffee 4 times a week
   1. This would decrease my coffee consumption by >50%
   2.  Tea requires on average 13.5 liters of water per 125 ml, whereas coffee requires 132 liters of water for the same sized cup (Chapagain and Hoekstra, 2003)
2. Use potatoes instead of wheat pasta to bulk out salads (I often make a salad of veggies, beans and pasta for school lunches)
   1. I would estimate that this would decrease my wheat consumption by at least 25%
   2.  Pasta requires 1850 liters/ kilogram, more than 6 times the 290 liters required to produce one kilogram of potatoes (Mekonnen and Hoekstra, 2011)

With these changes in mind, my goal for the next two weeks is to learn some new water-footprint friendly recipes and to stick to the restrictions I’ve set in place for myself, even when eating out. Thankfully Victoria is full of vegan options so it’s not too hard to find something that is relatively water-friendly. On my bucket list of places to try is the Very Good Butchers, a vegan “butcher shop” that serves burgers and comfort food and has many pulse-based meat alternatives for sale. I’m hoping to go in before the end of the project to see what alternatives they offer and how those ingredients compare to their meat counterparts in terms of water use!

Chapagain, A.K. and Hoekstra, A.Y. (2003) The water needed to have the Dutch drink coffee, Value of Water Research Report Series No.14, UNESCO-IHE, Delft, the Netherlands.

Mekonnen, M.M. and Hoekstra, A.Y. (2011) The green, blue and grey water footprint of crops and derived crop products, Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 15(5): 1577-1600.