Your Diet and the Environment

There are two commonly-known reasons for vegetarianism: avoidance of killing animals, and a more healthful diet. But there is a lesser-known reason for vegetarianism that many people would find persuasive, were they only aware of it.

I'm referring to the environmental and economic impacts of eating meat. Raising animals for slaughter and subsequent consumption is the most ludicrously inefficient and wasteful process that the modern-day free market still tolerates.

To raise a cow for hamburger meat requires:
1. Abundant land for grazing
2. Years of time
3. Enough food and water every day to feed multiple people

Clearing land for livestock is one of the primary reasons for deforestation, rainforests included. Just look at how much rainforest Brazil has destroyed in order to clear land for the meat industry. Also, the majority of agricultural land in the world today grows crops not to feed humans directly, but to feed the animals that will feed humans. Sound insane?

The amount of months and years it takes for a cow to mature enough to become your hamburger could be spent gathering multiple harvests of fruits, grains, or vegetables. And the fact that we feed a cow, day in, day out, for several years, means that we're providing it with thousands of human meals - just in order to create a few dozen hamburgers.

Put it all together, and it means that if no one ate meat, we would only need a fraction of the land we use today for agriculture, we would have an overabundance of food in the world, and deforestation would all but come to an end (especially because the land we would no longer need for agriculture could be used for RE-forestation).

As Peter Singer writes:

Animals raised in sheds or on feed-lots eat grains or soybeans, and they use most of the food value of these products simply in order to maintain basic functions and develop unpalatable parts of the body like bones and skin. To convert eight or nine kilos of grain protein into a single kilo of animal protein wastes land, energy, and water. On a crowded planet with a growing human population, that is a luxury we are becoming increasingly unable to afford.

Want to fight global warming? Stop eating meat:

Intensive animal production is a heavy user of fossil fuels and a major source of pollution of both air and water. It releases large quantities of methane and other greenhouse gases into our atmosphere. We are risking unpredictable changes to the climate of our planet... for the sake of mere hamburgers. A diet heavy in animal products... is a disaster for animals, the environment, and the health of those who eat it.

So avoidance of cruelty to animals and better health aren't the only reasons for going vegetarian. If you claim to support the environment but continue to eat meat, you need to face up to the fact that your actions do not match your ideals.