How many litres of water does it take to produce one hamburger?

How to get close to this number

Work back through the feed. A beef patty is a small amount of meat, but the animal ate many kilograms of grain and grass to produce it, and each kilogram of feed took hundreds of litres of water to grow. The water cost of meat is almost entirely the water cost of the crops behind it.

The shower comparison in the explanation is the framing that makes it comprehensible: about thirty average showers for one burger. Comparing an invisible embedded cost to a visible personal one is the only way to make a water footprint mean anything, because nobody has intuition for cubic metres.

A caveat worth stating: much of that water is rainfall falling on pasture that would have fallen anyway, which is not the same as water diverted from a river or pumped from an aquifer. Water footprint figures aggregate green, blue and grey water, and the environmental significance differs enormously between them — the headline number is directionally right and analytically blunt.