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Comment by ebcode | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to think of the state of California as one ginormous mining-town. Only instead of some rare mineral that will one day be exhausted, it's the groundwater in the aquifer that underlies the entire valley.

The concept of virtual water may help us to treat this vital resource with more care. I'm imagining something like a nutrition label, where there's an estimate of how many liters/gallons of water is needed to grow the food.

A quick search turned up a food/water required table: https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/jan/10/how-mu...

Looks like we could do quite a bit to reduce our individual water usage by substituting a meal of cabbage and potatoes for a chicken dinner every so often...

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The problem with that is that it's not water that's so valuable, it's water in California. Penalizing water use everywhere, even in rain-soaked places, would be counterproductive.

That's a good point. But I wouldn't classify the water usage label as "penalizing". It's more, um, informational. So if you're in CA, you might set an ideal "virtual water budget" for yourself (100 kl/mo for example), but if you're in VA, your ideal could be several times that.

But where you are located isn't what matters, it's where the water was consumed.

It does not matter where you are eating Californian almonds; those almonds still used Californian water.

That's another good point. Then the only way I could see it working universally is if you assign a price to the water consumed, where it's costlier in CA than VA.

Then you can say that a single almond grown in CA uses $.001 H2O, but in VA it's $.0001 H2O, or something like that.

It's just a thought experiment, of course. But it seems like a worthwhile one, if only to introduce the idea of accountability for the cost of water consumption in various foods.

The normal way to do this is to charge for the ingredient at source. It seems easier to change the California laws (constitution?) so that agriculture pays per gallon of water.

I don't know the specifics in California but property rights in water are complex, especially in the Western U.S. A mere change in regulations, even under a state constitution, might constitute a regulatory taking (i.e. a taking of property requiring just compensation under the 5th Amendment).

Because the issues are so complex, the legal terrain so unclear, and the consequences of an adverse court ruling so substantial, not to mention the politics, legislators are reticent to impose such strong measures.

Water laws are loose because they were written in a world where groundwater is almost as plentiful as air. Locations where this is still true should keep their simple laws (nobody wants a trillion detailed laws if there is no need), but places like California need to get more sophisticated.

Isn’t it really the more general water where things grow that’s valuable? If it’s grown and used water then it’s labeled. If water in CA is more scarce/expensive, then the market will balance around it.

People do not change their behavior until forced to by a major situation. Some labels aren't going to change anything.

Price labels likely will.

As in changing the actual price? Sure, but that seems different from add more info to the label.

> I'm imagining something like a nutrition label, where there's an estimate of how many liters/gallons of water is needed to grow the food.

We already have price labels.

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