I've written extensively on the consequences of eating meat - on our health, our sense of "right living", and on the environment. It is one of those daily practices that has such a broad and deep effect that I think it merits looking at over and over again, from all the different perspectives. Sometimes, solutions to the world's biggest problems are right in front of us. The following statistics are eye-opening, to say the least.
If everyone went vegetarian just for one day, the U.S. would save:
● 100 billion gallons of water, enough to supply all the homes in New England for almost 4 months;
● 1.5 billion pounds of crops otherwise fed to livestock, enough to feed the state of New Mexico for more than a year;
● 70 million gallons of gas--enough to fuel all the cars of Canada and Mexico combined with plenty to spare;
● 3 million acres of land, an area more than twice the size of Delaware;
● 33 tons of antibiotics.
If everyone went vegetarian just for one day, the U.S. would prevent:
● Greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 1.2 million tons of CO2, as much as produced by all of France;
● 3 million tons of soil erosion and $70 million in resulting economic damages;
● 4.5 million tons of animal excrement;
● Almost 7 tons of ammonia emissions, a major air pollutant.
My favorite statistic is this: According to Environmental Defense, if every American skipped one meal of chicken per week and substituted vegetarian foods instead, the carbon dioxide savings would be the same as taking more than half a million cars off of U.S. roads. See how easy it is to make an impact?
Other points:
Globally, we feed 756 million tons of grain to farmed animals. As Princeton bioethicist Peter Singer notes in his new book, if we fed that grain to the 1.4 billion people who are living in abject poverty, each of them would be provided more than half a ton of grain, or about 3 pounds of grain/day--that's twice the grain they would need to survive. And that doesn't even include the 225 million tons of soy that are produced every year, almost all of which is fed to farmed animals. He writes, "The world is not running out of food. The problem is that we--the relatively affluent--have found a way to consume four or five times as much food as would be possible, if we were to eat the crops we grow directly."
A recent United Nations report titled Livestock's Long Shadow concluded that the meat industry causes almost 40% more greenhouse gas emissions than all the world's transportation systems--that's all the cars, trucks, SUVs, planes and ships in the world combined. The report also concluded that factory farming is one of the biggest contributors to the most serious environmental problems at every level--local and global.
Researchers at the University of Chicago concluded that switching from standard American diet to a vegan diet is more effective in the fight against global warming than switching from a standard American car to a hybrid.
In its report, the U.N. found that the meat industry causes local and global environmental problems even beyond global warming. It said that the meat industry should be a main focus in every discussion of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortages and pollution, and loss of biodiversity.
Unattributed statistics were calculated from scientific reports by Noam Mohr, a physicist with the New York University Polytechnic Institute.
And kudos to anyone who read this and got the point that by cutting back just a little bit we can make a world of change.
For me the real point is that EVERYONE can do SOMETHING, and individual tiny steps can make huge differences.
The title of the article reads: The Breathtaking Effects of CUTTING BACK ... i assume those words aren't beyond the understanding of people reading/responding to this article, IRRESPECTIVE of diet.
The healthy human body needs half its weight in grams of protein just to
support tissue turn-over and repair, not to mention healthy immune system
function and maintenance. Vegetarian / meat restricted diets are not healthy.
A healthy adult weighting 200 lbs., needs 100 grams of *complete proteins*
which is difficult if not impossible to obtain, even with effective food combining,
including beans and rice - tofu and god only knows what to get the prerequisite
21 key amino acids to make a complete protein. Not easy on a vegan diet,
no matter how strict, knowledgeable and applied the person is.
Vegetable proteins are *incomplete proteins* and their amino acid
profiles in NO WAY represent proteins in our bodies
No disputing the facts or this article, just not an option for me or most people.
I believe in this article, I simply struggle to think of ways to incorporate
the jest of this article effectively in my approach to life. I will try,
the numbers make sense, more than the approach.
The essence of the article is appealing to me.
It is personally unhealthy to not take a break from meat. One should look out for their own health.
Download and print a 45-day sheet at: http://www.pledge45.org
Just write the days down and be organized about it. It will add up if we can commit.
Thank you.
This article assumes that the only meat available is from factory farms and the like.
I buy meat from local farmers that is grassfed, does not require much if any industrial scale grain production, and uses no antibiotics.
Ecologically produced grassfarmed meat doesnt have any of these problems.
It is stupid, selfish, and insane to willingly destroy the air, water, and climate of our planet, our only home, by the current practices of mass confinement and factory farming of billions of suffering, feeling individual animal beings for nothing more ultimately than our gastronomic titillation.
Also, when properly done, livestock farming is kinder to the environment than growing grains or vegetables. That said, I do think factory farming (monoculture) should be banned, regardless of whether the food comes from animals or plants.
100,000,000,000 gallons save per day is 36,500,000,000,000 gallons saved per year. This is 3.65 x 10e13 gallons. 0.133680 ft³ per gallon x this equals 4.87932e12 cubic feet. The cube root of this is 4.9 x 10e4 feet. So thinking of the water saved in a year as a cubic volume. The length of a side would be 49,000 feet or 9.2 miles.
The Comparative Anatomy of Eating
by Milton R. Mills, M.D.
http://www.geocities.com/RainForest/2062/ana.HTML
I'll take pastured meat and dairy. It's self fertilizing, doesn't require herbicide, and doesn't contribute to soil erosion.
It's time to take the emotion and sensationalism out of food production. Convoluted and misleading "facts" have replaced common sense.
And while I imagine you taking handfuls of fresh dung and dropping it in a flower pot to grow tomatoes, and then wiping your hands on a yellow dough cake before putting it in the oven... the rest of us have to process wet dung to get clean, white plastic pillows of usable fertilizer. That takes a tremendous industrial effort with plenty of pollution.
Food production is extremely wasteful, cowboy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_vegans
My favorite:
http://www.lillianmuller.com/