HARD TO SWALLOW - MEAT: A Benign Extravagance - page 80

from 2,500 to as much as 6,000 gallons [20,000 to 50,000 litres per kilo]. Dr.
Borgstrom, Drs Ehrlich and I all used the word 'meat' to refer specifically to beef.
How very scientific of them! By the same token, no doubt, they feel free to use the word
'beef' when they are referring specifically to feedlot steers fed on irrigated crops grown in
Cadillac Desert. It is, frankly, not very encouraging to discover that the cream of the United
States' environmental establishment can become exercised in a debate about the volumes
of water required to produce a kilo of meat, without bothering to define what species they
are talking about, what region they are talking about, or what management system is being
employed.
Some wild figures are also available for the amount of water used by slaughterhouses.
According to a report cited by Mark Gold, Brazil's biggest pig slaughterhouse at Concordia
Santa Catarina uses 10,000 cubic metres of water every working day. 12 That is a flow of
over one cubic metre every second - enough water in a day to cover an area of a hectare
one metre deep. If it is not completely awash, it must be a very big abattoir indeed.
I checked up with Snells of Chard, where Bramley was slaughtered, and they estimate
that washing down a 300 kilo beef carcase would take a maximum of 180 litres. In a day
in which they might slaughter 40 cattle, they use in total about 4,500 litres (1,000 gallons).
Staceys of Somerton also gave a figure of about 4,500 litres for a day in which they might
slaughter 40 pigs and 60 sheep.
Unless there is something which I have missed, all the commonly cited figures for water
consumption are wildly inaccurate in respect of grass-fed free range beef, killed in small-
scale abattoirs. Yet these figures are routinely cited by commentators without any regard
for whether they are meaningful or correct. No doubt, beef fed on forage grown on irrigated
land in semi-desert conditions consumes huge amounts of precious water; but this repres-
ents only a small fraction of the world's beef supply, and anyway most is produced to feed
North Americans, who on average consume huge amounts of almost everything.
As for the concept of 'embodied water' - the idea that by importing corn or beef we are
somehow importing somebody else's water - I'm not sure that isn't just hocus pocus. One
writer explains 'the concept is very similar to embedded carbon', but actually it isn't. 13 The
fossil fuel carbon that goes into making an ingot of aluminium is lost once it has been ex-
pended. The water that goes into animals, or into plants, isn't spent, it goes back into the
soil or the atmosphere. Certainly, when irrigation is employed, water takes a different, en-
gineered route, and that may lead to problems. But most beef is rainfed. When Bramley
died he didn't embody any water other than the 200 kilos or so that made up his body-
weight. All the rest of the water that he ingested throughout his life, he either excreted or
transpired, and it went back into the environment to be used by some other living creature.
1 Porritt, Jonathan (2006), 'Hard to Swallow', The Guardian , 4 January.