Vegan

Water where I live is a non renewable resource and is being drained from ancient aquifers at an alarming rate. Once it is gone we essentially have to leave this entire region and it is being drained for ranching and growing alfalfa.

I want people to stop assuming that simplified framing of a complex issue is the whole story.

Volume of water is an easy metric for people to understand. When people talk about wasting water they might mean literally moving water out of its water shed, like groundwater wells being pumped dry or they might also be thinking of the massive amounts of energy required to move and potentially treat that water and the (heat, nutrient) pollution the used water carries.

These impacts are not universal and which ones apply in which locations, and the impact they have will vary widely. So volume of water is an easy way to make it easier to understand and 'smooth' out the variations.

Water usage for beef's cattle feed in the US at least is quite often in water scarce areas

Correspondingly, our hydrologic modelling reveals that cattle-feed irrigation is the leading driver of flow depletion in one-third of all western US sub-watersheds; cattle-feed irrigation accounts for an average of 75% of all consumptive use in these 369 sub-watersheds. During drought years (that is, the driest 10% of years), more than one-quarter of all rivers in the western US are depleted by more than 75% during summer months (Fig. 2 and Supplementary Fig. 2) and cattle-feed irrigation is the largest water use in more than half of these heavily depleted rivers

https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1064&context=wffdocs