Sam Berridge

The crime they see: 15,415 litres of water to produce one kilogram of beef. Every campaign, every documentary, every leaflet through the door since about 2012. The crime they do: not reading the paper. The figure is real. It comes from Mekonnen and Hoekstra at the University of Twente, and it is careful, peer-reviewed work. What the campaigns strip out is that the same authors split that number into three parts, because the three parts are not the same thing at all. Green water is rain. It falls on the grass. The cow eats the grass. For beef, green water is about 94 per cent of that headline. Blue water is the stuff that matters. Rivers, lakes, aquifers. The stuff that gets pumped, metered, fought over in court, and does not come back. So here is the blue water, in litres per kilogram, from the same authors, same method, same units. - Pistachios: 7,602 - Almonds: 3,816 - Walnuts: 2,451 - Dates: 1,250 - Cashews: 921 - Beef: 550 Read that last line again, then go and look at what is in your granola. The 15,415 counts rain that fell on a Welsh hillside as a cost, against an animal that was standing in it, on land where nothing else grows, in a country where rain is the one thing we have never once been short of. The pistachio is drinking fourteen times more of the water that actually runs out. She is outside in the rain right now, getting blamed for it.