Washington D.C. — An anti-beef “naked shower” protest from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals in Times Square today will demonstrate that the animal rights group’s employees either aren’t terribly good at math, or don’t shower often enough.
PETA falsely claims that “producing just 1 pound of meat requires water equivalent to more than a year’s worth of showers.” But according to the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology (CAST), it would take less than 18 ten-minute showers to consume the amount of water required to produce a pound of American beef.* That includes all the water consumed by cattle, plus everything involved in irrigating feed crops and processing the meat.
“If these PETA protesters are only showering 18 times a year, I guess Times Square is as good a place as any to catch up,” said David Martosko, Director of Research at the Center for Consumer Freedom, a food-issues watchdog group. “Once again the vegetarian kook fringe is trying to horn in on Earth Day, but the facts just aren’t on their side.”
“We’ve always said that PETA stinks, but now we know why,” Martosko concluded.
*CAST calculated in its 1999 Animal Agriculture and Global Food Supply report that producing one pound of beef consumed a total of 435 gallons of water. Typical modern showerheads consume 2.5 gallons of water per minute; a 10-minute shower uses 25 gallons.
