Are almonds really as sustainable as we think, or just a waste of water?
Until about 2011,
almonds were sitting pretty. Americans were finally getting excited about
regularly eating something genuinely good for them.
Almond butter had penetrated the market to challenge peanut butter as the
only game in town. But then, a scathing report brought the concept of a food’s
‘water footprint’ into the mainstream, and the almond became a poster
child of foods that require an irresponsibly high amount of water.
A water footprint is
the amount of water involved in growing, processing, and delivering a product
to us.
All together, the US
agriculture industry sucks up about 80 per cent of the country’s available
fresh water. In part because of climate change (drought, extreme temperatures,
erratic rain), by the year 2025, two-thirds of the people on this planet could
face water shortages. That’s what’s at stake here.
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