Why One Should Be A Vegetarian – Some Statistics

I am a vegetarian by choice and would continue to be one to the end of my days because I strongly believe that the modern diet that relies heavily on meat and animal products is wasteful of the earth’s resources. In this article I would like to discuss in brief some of the wastages that we indulge in when we eat meat. In the later posts I’ll take up each of these in greater detail.

I firmly believe that by becoming a vegetarian you can contribute to the preservation of scarce resources of this planet and ensure that all have enough. As Mahatma Gandhi said, “The earth has enough for everyone’s need, but not for everyone’s greed”.

Sample some of our wasteful indulgences to indulge in meat!

1. Meat production is a large scale industry that consumes vast amounts of grain and soy beans. The amount of grains that we feed the animals so that we can then consume them is enough to sustain 5 times the human population! Don’t believe it? Well it is a fact and I plan to prove it by the first principles in the coming days. Just watch out for this space.
2. Great tracts of forest have been cut down to provide grazing land for cattle contributing to the problem of global warming. Plants and trees are “sink” for carbon dioxide and what do we do? We eradicate trees and plants so that animals can graze! And animals produce more CO₂. So the earth’s store of CO₂ gets to grow in geometrical progression.
3. This resource hungry industry provides more food to the rich world than ever before at the cost of poorer nations. Result is that many people go hungry while those in the rich industrialized world suffer from a whole range of diseases that are caused by eating too much meat and animal fat. Again a double whammy of sorts.
4. An estimated 800 million people live in the shadow of hunger. World hunger is increasing at a rate of 4 million a year. If all the farm produce that is used to feed animals was used to feed people a vegetarian diet then no one in the world would need to be hungry. It takes 7.5 pounds of animal feed to produce 1 pound of pork and 5 pounds to produce 1 pound of chicken.
5. The American pork industry consumed 1.08 billion bushels of corn in 2004 and 265 million bushels of soybeans. This creates competition between humans and animals. And which animals at that? Ones that do not exist naturally but are “artificially” reared so that we can eat them!
6. When we factor in the use of fossil fuels in the livestock industry for heating, lighting and transportation then the modern meat based diet begins to look totally unsustainable. Not to forget the fact that the quantum of fossil fuel that is also needed to make meat edible – after all you need to cook it and make it soft enough to be eaten!
7. It takes one sixth of an acre of land to produce enough food for a vegan but more than three acres to feed a meat eater. That is a factor of 18!
8. The high price of meat has encouraged many farmers in poor countries to shift away from their traditional crops that provided a largely vegetarian diet. They are increasingly producing livestock that they can sell to richer countries. Two-thirds of the grain that is exported from America goes to feed livestock.
9. Fishing does not use up grain. But it does not really provide a sustainable alternative to meat. Most of the world’s major fisheries are in decline because of over fishing.

10.  Fish farming is as costly in terms of feed as other forms of livestock farming. It takes 5 pounds of feed to produce a pound of fish.

The only real alternative to this waste of resources is for vegetarianism to become the diet of more people – far more than the current 3% of the human population.

This vegetarian is taking a stand against the wasteful use of resources.

Are you with me or against me?

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