How Green Are Your Veggies?

Does your lunch use too much water? New and improved food guilt available now!

Everybody knows one: you may even be one yourself—an enviro-snob; a holier-than-thou worshipper of mother earth, a fundamentalist ecologist concerned with pollution, carbon footprint, greenhouse gas, fish farming and the obscene wars for oil to fuel society. We’ve all heard the lectures about how we’re supposed to cut down, use less, have less, do less, eat less, produce less waste, use less water or else—and herewith offer a suitable take on the "lesser than" outlook to use on your friends, relatives and anyone who does not meet the exacting standards of the Age of Less.
Take vegetables for instance; though veggies are lauded as a sustainable, natural and more wholesome way to eat and live well, the growing water shortage in California and the west requires that sensitive souls everywhere re-evaluate their diet to lean out the conspicuous consumers of water from the plant kingdom—and their diet. No more water wasting veggies on the table; tough times call for tough measures—and dry food.
Let’s start with fertilizer. Fertilizer use goes hand in hand with high water consumption since water is needed to break down fertilizers and release nitrogen that makes plants grow. According to the UN Food & Agriculture Organization, bananas consume the most fertilizer per acre of cultivation—some 427 pounds. This requires huge amounts of water to process that growth, making bananas an extravagant user of resources. Sugar beets and citrus crops are next in line on the perp walk of resource shame, followed in order by broccoli, tomatoes, carrots, potatoes and other tubers and finally, grains. Peas and beans require just 35 pounds of fertilizer per acre and a correspondingly low water level to match. Peas and beans have the capacity to absorb nitrogen out of the air. So if you want to go easy on the environment and scarce water, eat more peas and beans.
Next, let’s look at pesticides. Growing plants that are well fertilized and well watered are prime targets for insects and other life forms that want to eat them same way you do and to rob other life forms of their food supply, they have to be killed with chemicals. The Pesticide Action Network claims that among California products, raspberries are the worst offenders when it comes to pesticide needs, requiring 20.2 pounds for every acre of land on average. Carrots and strawberries are next on the list and wild rice claims some six pounds per acre of pesticide.
Water hog citrus and avocados top out with highest consumption of water per acre and per tree. Avos in particular are a thirsty fruit, in some cases requiring nearly 40 gallons per tree yearly. Oranges need somewhat less, depending on their site; drier areas require some 20 to 30 gallons per tree, per year. San Diego produces more avocados than anywhere else in the US. Soon, due to lack of water, it will produce more avocado tree firewood than elsewhere because the trees aren’t economically feasible to water anymore. Tough guacamole, baby, but that’s what you get when you put a thirsty tree in an arid zone.
As if this isn’t enough, we can also gauge the environmental efficiency of food crops, so as to know the return of calories consumable per pound of water, fertilizer and pesticide. White rice came out the big winner here, being much more efficient than anything else, according to California Farm Board researchers. Rice returns some 2 million calories per pound of pesticide used. Onions were pretty good, too; so was sweet corn. Oranges, apples and strawberries weren’t; too much in for very little output per pound of poison, H2O and fertilizer.
What this means is that about a third of greenhouse gas arising from agriculture in the US comes from fertilizers and pesticides and using less-consuming foods buys time and slows global warming. It also gives environauts everywhere one more thing to obsess about. Eat, drink and be merry; even if you get to live on beans, peas, rice and corn from now on, while worrying about high carb levels and diabetes concerns.—Victor Chapman