It takes a lot of water to produce many of the foods we enjoy in our everyday life and this is something that we really should be paying more attention to, especially as climate change will cause more droughts and greater water scarcity in the future to some areas.

A recently published study in the journal Nutrients looked at the diet of just over 9k Australians and found that the average footprint was 362 liters per day. Surprisingly, red meat which is often a villain in climate discussions was only 3.7% of the footprint. The largest contribution was fruit.

So what does this mean? Well, mostly it’s just something to think about as water does go into making our foods. But there’s no real way to measure this in the real world as that information isn’t really listed on packaging. For now, it’s just something to consider when you can.