Water shortage in the U.S. is a big deal right now. California's in a seemingly hopeless drought, and the people all around are blaming it on the animal food industry. In animal agriculture, water is used for the animals' intake, cleaning barns, irrigation for crops to feed the animals, cleaning carcasses and finally, at the consumers' end, cooking food. That's a lot of water! Nathan Runkle, founder and president of Mercy for Animals, makes big arguments about how much water the industry uses. He says that to make one pound of beef 1800 gallons of water are used, and to produce a gallon of milk 880 gallons of water are used(1)! When I read this I was astonished. But then I realized even though he claimed to have gotten the information from National Geographic, he didn't say how old the numbers were. A little more research and I found that his numbers, while possibly true at some point in time, were definitely not accurate today. Carl Bailik, from the Wall St...