What are the most water-intensive foods?

“The water footprint”, calculated by the Water footprint network (a network bringing together scientists, companies and citizens), specifies the amount of water direct and indirect necessary for the manufacture of different products. For beef, for example, we take into account the water used to grow the pasture or the cereals used to feed the animal, the water that the cow and that necessary for the processing and transport of meat.

Chocolate, coffee, dried fruits: a lot of water for little raw material

But if beef is often singled out, the chocolate and coffee do even worse, with respectively 17,196 liters and 15,897 liters per kilogram of product. Of course, we rarely eat a kilo of chocolate all at once, but it turns out that cocoa trees need a lot of water, between 10 and 15 liters per day, which pushes large farms to massively irrigate their plantations. Ditto for coffee: in your 125 milliliter cup, there are actually… 130 liters of water! The dried fruit (cashew nut, pistachiosalmonds, hazelnuts), are badly named and are also among the foods that contain the most “virtual” water.

Fruits and vegetables: the foods that require the least water

Among the good students are the vegetables (237 liters of water per kilogram for lettuce or 287 liters for potatoes for example), where little water is lost or evaporated during the manufacturing process and therefore ends up in the final product. Even taking into account water expenditure per calorie (meat being more nutritious than vegetables), animal products have a less favorable water footprint than plant products. Producing one calorie of beef will thus require 10.2 liters of water compared to 1.8 liters for milk or 0.5 liters for cereals. In the end, if every Frenchman went on a diet vegetarian, up to 2,770 liters per person per day could be saved each year, more than one million liters per year.