Feeding the World with Plants
Considering the vast resources squandered to provide consumers with meat, it’s obvious that it’s an illogical, inefficient way to feed our continually growing population. Vegetarian diets can sustain far more people than diets that revolve around meat – when we eat grains, vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds, we’re eating the food that is fed to the meat animals that are later, in turn, eaten by us. It just doesn’t make sense! Factor in the damage to the earth, the water and the air ... on a global level, our reliance on animal foods is devastating.
There’s some debate as to whether choosing a meatless diet really helps to feed people elsewhere – there simply isn’t enough food to feed the world, but that’s an issue with far more complicated issues of politics, distribution and geography involved than just choice of diet. But one thing is certain – Westerners eat way more food than we need. In poorer nations, the average person eats about a pound of grain each day. In the United States, it’s four times that – and a large part of that is the grain used to produce the animal proteins we eat. While people are starving all over the globe, the U.S. feeds 70 percent of its harvested grain to animals – meaning that most of the food we grow goes to produce even more food that most of the rest of the world can’t afford to purchase.
What’s absolutely true is that the expansion of meat-eating around the world is directly contributing to hunger, and will continue to do so unless something drastic is done. Worldwide, meat production quadrupled from 44 million tons in 1950 to 195 million tons in 1996. Countries like China and India – both countries with a long, rich tradition of vegetable-based diets – are becoming increasingly avid consumers of meat foods. In China alone, pork consumption has risen so astronomically in the last decade, the Chinese now consume more pork per person than in the United States. And while India still has the largest vegetarian population in the world, the country is now also the largest exporter of meat in Asia. There just isn’t enough grain to support these industries, much less feed people directly. In 1993, China exported 8 million tons of grain, thanks to the country’s expanding pork industry, China imported 16 million tons of grain in 1995 – just two years later. Meat-eating is almost universally seen as a symbol of a economic progress, but the more meat humans eat, the more humans there are that go hungry.
It’s likely that, if more people embraced vegetarianism, less animals would be fed and killed for meat. A widespread conversion to plant-based diets would reduce food shortage simply by reducing the amount of factory-farmed animals and their drain on land and other resources. With fewer animals to feed, it might be possible to rebuild world grain reserves, guaranteeing that there’s enough food for even the poorest countries. And reducing the amount of world-wide animal agriculture would contribute to biological diversity, climate control, and the ozone layer.
It’s a lot to comprehend, thinking about world hunger. Ultimately, though, your conscience is your guide – knowing what you know now, do you still feel good about eating a hamburger? Albert Einstein said it best: "Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet." By choosing a meatless lifestyle, your choosing to be a caring citizen of the world.
