Is It Really Better to Eat Vegetarian in a Drought?

We can’t tell you exactly what to eat during the drought, but this video should help you make the choice for yourself.
Is It Really Better to Eat Vegetarian in a Drought
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Getting down to the cold hard numbers of water usage in agriculture is a tricky business. There are so many different ways to dissect the data: You can tabulate the water used by weight of food, by grams of protein, by caloric content, even by nutritional value. We can’t tell you exactly what to eat during the drought, but all those different slices of the pie—analyzed in the video below—should help you make the choice for yourself.

For this video we synthesized as much data as we possibly could and distilled it down into something bite-sized, but we encourage you do do some of your own research and we wanted to share our sources. For starters, read WIRED’s Guide to Produce that Won’t Make the Drought Worse, written by our own Joanna Pearlstein. For the definitive article on almonds and alfalfa, check out Alissa Walker’s piece on Gizmodo. The LA Times made a really easy-to-use interactive infographic to help you figure out how many gallons of water your meals use, and you should definitely play with that.