Are almonds really as sustainable as we think, or just a waste of water?

Until about 2011, almonds were sitting pretty. Americans were finally getting excited about regularly eating something genuinely good for them.

Almond butter had penetrated the market to challenge peanut butter as the only game in town. But then, a scathing report brought the concept of a food’s ‘water footprint’ into the mainstream, and the almond became a poster child of foods that require an irresponsibly high amount of water.

A water footprint is the amount of water involved in growing, processing, and delivering a product to us.

All together, the US agriculture industry sucks up about 80 per cent of the country’s available fresh water. In part because of climate change (drought, extreme temperatures, erratic rain), by the year 2025, two-thirds of the people on this planet could face water shortages. That’s what’s at stake here.

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