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I estimate that the typical meat-eating, beer-swilling, milk Western Provincial Government of the people, I consume as much as 100 times my own weight of water every day. Hat is a well-off, then, my daughter is a vegetarian, who will receive approximately half. It is, of course, out of the evangelical water conservation.... Audit of the annual announcements. I probably drink of water is only about 265 gallons 1 tons or 1.3 cubic yards - for a whole year. Around the home, I use 50 to 100 tons. However, more and more clothes and feed crops, I was, from 15 million tons a year by 2000, more than half of the content and standards of the Olympic Swimming Pool. From all of this water there?           As the Reality Trickles In     I only became slowly aware of it... [t]he maps in my atlas no longer seemed to accord with reality. Inland seas and lakes were disappearing. The old geography lesson about how rivers emerged from mountains, gathered water from tributaries, and finally disgorged their bloated flows into the oceans were now fiction. Many rivers were dying as they went on, not growing.   The Nile in Egypt, the Yellow River in China, the Indus in Pakistan, the Colorado and Rio Grande in the United States—all were reported to be trickling into the sand, sometimes hundreds of miles from the sea.... Some kind of cataclysm was striking the world's rivers…   Few of us realize how much water it takes to get us through the day. On average, we drink no more than a gallon and a half of the stuff. Including water for washing and for flushing the toilet, we use only about 40 gallons each. In some countries suburban lawn sprinklers, swimming pools, and sundry outdoor uses can double that figure.  Typical per capita water use in suburban Australia is about 90 gallons, and in the United States around 100 gallons.   ... We can all save water in the home. But as laudable as it is to take a shower rather than a bath and turn off the faucet while brushing our teeth, we shouldn't get hold of the idea that regular domestic water use is what is really emptying the world's rivers. Manufacturing the goods that we fill our homes with consumes a certain amount, but that's not the real story either. It is only when we add in the water needed to grow what we eat and drink that the numbers really begin to soar.   Get your head around a few of these numbers, if you can. They are mind-boggling. It takes between 250 and 650 gallons of water to grow a pound of rice. That is more water than many households use in a week. For just a bag of rice. Keep going. It takes 130 gallons to grow a pound of wheat and 65 gallons for a pound of potatoes. And when you start feeding grain to livestock for animal products such as meat and milk, the numbers become yet more startling. It takes 3000 gallons to grow the feed for enough cow to make a quarter-pound hamburger, and between 500 and 1000 gallons for that cow to fill its udders with a quart of milk…   And if you think your shopping cart is getting a little bulky at this point, maybe you should leave that 1-pound box of sugar on the shelf. It took up to 400 gallons to produce. And the 1-pound jar of coffee tips the scales at 2650 gallons—or 10 tons—of water. Imagine taking that home from the store.   Turn these statistics into meal portions and you come up with more than 25 gallons for a portion of rice, 40 gallons for the bread in a sandwich or a serving of toast, 130 gallons for a two-egg omelet or a mixed salad, 265 gallons for a glass of milk, 400 gallons for an ice cream, 530 gallons for a pork chop, 800 gallons for a hamburger, and 1320 gallons for a small steak. And if you have a sweet tooth, so much the worse: every teaspoonful of sugar in your coffee requires 50 cups of water to grow. Which is a lot, but not as much as the 37 gallons of water (or 592 cups) needed to grow the coffee itself. Prefer alcohol? A glass of wine or beer with dinner requires another 66 gallons, and a glass of brandy afterward takes a staggering 530 gallons.   We are all used to reading detailed technical information about the nutritional content of most food. Maybe it is time that we were given some clues as to how much water it took to grow and process the food. As the world's rivers run dry, it matters.   I figure that as a typical meat-eating, beer-swilling, milk-guzzling Westerner, I consume as much as a hundred times my own weight in water every day. Hats off, then, to my vegetarian daughter, who gets by with about half that. It's time, surely, to go out and preach the gospel of water conservation.   ... Let's do the annual audit. I probably drink only about 265 gallons of water—that's one ton or 1.3 cubic yards—in a whole year. Around the home I probably use between 50 and 100 tons. But growing the crops to feed and clothe me for a year must take between 1500 and 2000 tons—more than half the contents of an Olympic-size swimming pool.   Where does all that water come from?         — Fred Pearce, When the Rivers Run Dry: Water--The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-first Century                         Indexes/18