How America’s Diet Is Feeding the Groundwater Crisis | As dinner tables and snack menus feature far more chicken and cheese, farms are expanding where water is scarce.

www.nytimes.com

How America’s Diet Is Feeding the Groundwater Crisis

These transformations are tied to the changing American diet. Since the early 1980s, America’s per-person cheese consumption has doubled, largely in the form of mozzarella-covered pizza pies. And last year, for the first time, the average American ate 100 pounds of chicken, twice the amount 40 years ago.

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- We need to take a whole-cloth look at how agribusiness operates. Why is there so much outrage over resources we're using to farm chicken, which as you pointed out are lower calorie-for-calorie than beef, but crickets for the resources we're wasting on growing alfalfa in Arizona.
  
  Also, start eating crickets! They're a great source of protein!
- Plants. Also making fewer people might help?
  
  Aren't plants even worse?
- Produce less people. Reducing the per person carbon production is meaningless when we keep adding people. In 1950, there way 1/3rd less people and less than half the number of Americans.
  We have eaten animal protein for millennia. It was instrumental to our evolution. It’s only a problem now that we have way too many people
  
  We’re already reducing population. In order to stave off disaster without atrocity we will need to accept lifestyle changes. Groundwater issues are a problem now, not in a generation. And there have been vegans and vegetarians for millennia too.
- If only there were other things to eat.
- Stop eating animals. Its really not hard.
  
  Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Most people aren't going to stop eating meat, that's an unrealistic expectation. If you're telling people that eating chicken over beef isn't good enough they will shrug their shoulders and go right back to beef.
- Actually cut beef consumption sharply. That frees up a huge amount of land and water
- They want you to eat bugs...
I don't think reducing human culinary culture down to only what is the most efficient per calorie per acre food is a laudable goal. If there is a ground water crisis, maybe the solution is to produce food in sustainable locations, ban food exports, and profit from food.
- That should be done as well of course.
- Some foods like cheese can also be made much more efficiently than with cows milk with new biotechnologies. There are a handful of companies that turn sugar water into cows milk using specially engineered yeast. https://perfectday.com/process/
This is a farming/regulation problem. Not a consumption problem. Almonds are a similar food grown where they shouldn’t be.
- Yeah chicken consumption is going up because it's almost always the cheapest option in the shelves (here anyway). People aren't magically all deciding to eat it. It's what they can afford.
- I think the problem with almonds in california is more of a problem of water rights which were granted generations ago. They have to use the water so they literally just flood fields. Almonds can and are grown with much less wasteful techniques all over the world.
And the push for Americans to stop eating meat and switch to eating bugs lives on... disgusting

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