This blog usually covers metering, utility communications networks, and smart infrastructure solutions, so if you’re reading it, you’re often thinking about water and energy use, too. Still, you might be surprised to learn how much water and energy goes into the goodies topping a holiday table.
Gobble, gobble, glug, glug
Turkey is the traditional star of a Thanksgiving feast, and water makes it possible. Raising one pound of turkey in the U.S. consumes an estimated 266 gallons of water, according to Population Education, a nonprofit organization focused on educating schoolchildren about sustainability and population impacts. This reflects all the activities involved in the process, including farm activities, water used to grow turkey feed as well as butchering and packaging.
Other parts of the typical holiday spread also have an eye-popping water footprint:
- Pecan pie: 1086 gallons
- Green bean casserole with fried onions on top: 547 gallons
- Dinner rolls (24): 585 gallons
- Bowl of mashed potatoes with butter: 275 gallons
- Glass of wine: 36 gallons
Chances are, after eating turkey for days, you’ve thrown some away. Haven’t we all?
ReFED, a leading nonprofit working to end food waste, predicted in 2022 that more than 305 million pounds of food would go to waste after Thanksgiving dinner alone. The value of this mealtime trash was $400 million, and the production of these vittles generated the greenhouse gas emissions of 169,000 cars for an entire year. That food also had a water footprint estimated at 104 billion gallons, the same amount of water used by the population of New York City over a three-and-a-half-month period.
Water comes into play each year after the meal, too. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Approximately 30 million Americans will watch football. At halftime, American toilets will flush 30 million times and use 108 million gallons of water – enough to fill an entire football stadium! Water efficient toilets would save 62 million gallons of water.”
Holidays are energy hogs, too
Water isn’t the only commodity that gets used abundantly on Thanksgiving.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, some 48 million turkeys are consumed annually on Thanksgiving. Assuming cooking each turkey uses 8 kWh of electricity, we collectively use about 384 million kWh of energy to cook our holiday birds.
And, here’s another energy eater over the holidays: Christmas light displays. Do you remember Clark Griswold, the head of the family in National Lampoon’s 1989 Christmas Vacation movie? ElectricChoice.com calculated the cost of his 25,000 incandescent Christmas lights at 12 cents per kilowatt hour. With those rates, Clark would have paid $1,600 for that holiday display burning bright from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day.
The cost is much lower now that most people use LED Christmas lights. If you’d like to know what your holiday lighting display might cost you, use this calculator from We Energies.
This blog was originally published in 2020 and updated in 2025.
