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| A delicious pizza margarita (check a recipe on this blog by Shadrach) |
To make a pizza you need 1216 liters of water! An incredible amount which almost makes me ashamed to order one. But have you ever wondered why does it takes so much water to make a pizza margarita? Go with me on a trip through Italy (after all its almost time to go on holiday)and discover the whole story.
This post is inspired by a research
executed by some Dutch universities, published in 2009. They considered a pizza
margarita contains bread dough, tomato sauce and mozzarella as ingredient, thus
forgetting about the olive oil and the basil that ‘formally’ are also included
but in such a low quantity that forgetting about is, is not such a shame.
Let’s start with the base of the pizza and thus the dough. Pasta is usually
made from durum wheat, while pizza is usually
made out of a softer wheat to which water and some salt is added to allow to
make a soft pasta. In Italy this is mostly grown in Emilia Romagna, a region in
the centre-north of the country which has a wet winter dry summers. For the specific
type of cereal this can be called an ‘ideal’ climate. Of the harvested product,
72 percent can be used for the pizza dough.
To top-off the dough, a tomato sauce (industrial) or fresh
tomatoes are added. Until a few years ago most tomatoes where grown in the
southern part of the country, but recently there has been a shift towards the
north, where there are more facilities to process them and where the soil is
not (yet) exhausted. Thanks to the climate here, the waterfootprint is much lower than that for the fresh tomatoes that still grow in
the south. However, the fact that nitrogen is used to ‘feed’ the plants means
that an invisible side effect adds-up to the water foodprint in the form of polluted
water.
Going north even further and we bump into the mozzarella
factories. The cheese originally is made by buffaloes, but to lower the prices
and to respond to the high demand, most mozzarella is now made out of cows milk
and officially is called ‘fior di latte’. Before reading the article I referred
to before, I did not know that this is kneaded as if it becomes a dough in
order to mix the curt with heated whey and obtain the shiny white balls we all
call mozzarella.
Even though for the mozzarella we do not start to calculate
from the seed an further, for the calculation of the water foodprint of a pizza
margarita it is considered that a cow lives around 7 years during which it
consumes 1308 liters of water per kilo of ‘body weigth’. On top-of that it is
needed to calculate the water consumed by the cow and the water needed to clean
the facilities she lives in. This and the fact that only 10 percent of the milk
becomes mozzarella calculates for a waterfootprint of 717 liters per kilo
mozzarella. Thirsty?
I always try to save as much energy as possible, so reducing
the amount of water I use is one of it. But now I know how much water it takes
to eat some of the foods I eat regularly, I am not so sure that my actions
contribute more than a drop in the ocean. I won’t say that I now can forget
about this. Rather in the contrary. Maybe I should focus even more on the foods
and their water request to make sure I make a serious contribution to water
savings?
