Water is needed to not only grow everything we eat but also to
produce almost all the products we use every day. This water is
supplied by nature as precipitation or added by people during
the growing and production process. You can't tell by the size
of a product or the appearance of a food how much water was
actually used to produce the item.
Use the form below to enter your guess about how much water is
used to produce some common foods and products. Please realize
this exercise is meant to give you an estimate of how much water
is needed to produce these items. It is very difficult to come
up with accurate water-use numbers, and the large variety of
food-growing and production techniques used worldwide means that
the amount of water needed can vary a huge amount, depending on
how and where the food is grown.
Yet another consideration is how far back to go in the chain of
production to estimate water use. For beef, some estimates only
consider drinking water for cattle, whereas other sources may
consider the water needed to grow the food that the cow eats.
