Vegetarianism—The Thoughtful Alternative

There are many, many benefits that you’ll see immediately when you become a vegetarian, including clear skin, shiny hair, and lower risk of high cholesterol, diabetes, and kidney disease. But the wider benefit is the one you can’t see: the benefit to the rest of the world. Keep the following facts in mind when you feel tempted to go back to eating meat.

You’re helping to conserve water. Water is the earth’s most precious resource, and currently about 50 percent of the water in the United States is used to grow crops for grain-fed animals—as opposed to 35 percent that’s used to grow food crops for humans to eat. It takes roughly 15 times as much water to produce the same amount of protein from an animal that we can get from plant sources. By 2025, two-thirds of the world will face shortage of water. This will most likely lead to difficulty in food production, overpopulation in certain areas, and civil unrest. Switching to a vegetarian diet is the single biggest thing that you can do to cut down on your consumption of water.

You’re helping to protect the land. Livestock grazing erodes topsoil, drying out the land and making it unusable for farming. This is one reason why forests are being cut at an alarming rate to make room for more cattle grazing. Agriculture accounts for nearly 90 percent of the thirty million acres of rain forest that are destroyed each year. Nearly 25 percent of all prescription drugs have a basis in rain forest plants; destroying the rain forest may mean destroying our chances of curing cancer or AIDS.

You’re helping to conserve fossil fuels. In this supply-and-demand world, less demand means less production, which means less consumption of fossil fuels. Animal agriculture uses more than a third of the fossil fuels consumed in the United States; a calorie of animal protein requires ten times as much fuel as is needed to produce a calorie of plant protein. Researchers at the University of Chicago compared the amount of fossil fuel needed to cultivate and process various foods and the amount of fuel that’s used to operate agricultural machinery, provide food for livestock, and irrigate crops. They also factored in emissions of methane and nitrous oxide produced by cows, sheep, and manure treatment. According to the findings, the average American diet that consists of about 28 percent animal foods generates an equivalent of 1.5 tons more carbon dioxide each year than a comparable vegan diet. The researchers pointed out that driving a hybrid car rather than an average vehicle would conserve a little over one ton of carbon dioxide per year—meaning that living a vegan lifestyle reduces more emissions than is done by driving a hybrid car!

You’re making a more compassionate choice.

Now that you’ve read about the horrors of factory farming, do you think that slice of bacon really worth it? There’s a famous quote from George Bernard Shaw: “When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.” Many people believe that we have a natural right to kill and eat animals, but imagine a time when an alien species visits our planet. They’re smarter than we are, have technology far more advanced than our own, and they like to eat meat. So humans become the factory-farmed animals taken to slaughterhouses; as we cry and scream and fight to no avail, we’re shoved into pens until such time as we’re marched onto the killing floor, bashed in the head, and stripped of our flesh, which is then neatly packaged for market.

It’s a horrible thought, yet that’s what humans do to animals every day. St. Francis of Assisi said, “If you have men who will exclude any of god’s creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.” Choosing a vegetarian lifestyle is choosing the path of compassion.

How We Treat the Food We Eat

Farming has been a part of human history, but the old way of farming in which the animals’ best interests were at heart is long gone. The people who raised animals for meat, milk, eggs, and more took care of their flock or herd. They knew that if any of the animals fell sick, their entire farming operation would be at risk. Farmers had a vested interest in making sure their animals were properly cared for. They placed animals in an environment that was conducive to their way of life, such as grazing areas
for cows and sheep. But the twentieth century brought industrialization and, with it, industrial farming.

Farming factories began sprouting up everywhere. Animals are now kept in overcrowded factories where hormones and other antibiotics are used to keep them healthy (though many of them still die prematurely because of the restricted environment). You probably don’t think about the way animals are treated when you sit down to eat a nonvegetarian meal. But that’s normal. Most people don’t stop and think about the food that they eat.

Why would they? They don’t have a clue about how animals are raised and processed because a lot of the information isn’t being passed along to the consumer. If the truth about the way animals were treated was more accessible, there’d be more vegetarians than meat eaters in the world!