A friend told me that humans were meant to eat meat. That may be true, but we have free will! We can eat what we want, and I chose to be a vegetarian. I know you’re tired of hearing the whole health benefits spiel, so I’ll give you different reasons why veggies are the way to go!
1. More people will be fed! Animals who are farmed for meat consume a lot of grain. You could feed the entire world if you fed 100% of it to people! Also, Soil and Water journal states that one acre of land produces 250 pounds of beef…or 50,000 pounds of tomatoes.
2. You spend less. Switching to vegetables saved my friend a few thousand a year on food expenses. That’s a few thousand more you can spend on a vacation or new clothes!
3. You can drink cleaner water. It only takes 25 gallons of water to produce a pound of wheat. It takes a hundred times more to produce a pound of beef! Nitrate from manure is also one of the leading water pollutants in the US.
I’m not blaming non-vegetarians, since it’s what they chose, but for me, this lifestyle is better. What do you think?
13 Comments
April 28, 2008 at 7:14 pm
I recently blogged about this too… although I recommended eating less meat (for the people who just love a burger every now and then). People used to only eat meat on special occasions now it can be breakfast, lunch and dinner. If everyone does not want to be a vegetarian at least they can reduce the amount of meat they eat.
http://green4u.wordpress.com
April 29, 2008 at 8:43 am
actually that makes some economic sense
April 30, 2008 at 11:51 am
Our cultures have evolved around the things we eat. We still use leather, wool, and duck down, even though production of synthetics seems cheaper and more efficient. We still use these substances as they are a useful by-product of the larger meat industry, reduce the demand for meat and these things might become unviable.
If we eliminate the demand for meat entirely we’ll then have to kill off all those unnaturally large herds and flocks, as they’ll be in directly competition for the land we need to plant those extra grain crops. I can’t see ducks, turkeys, cows, sheep, or pigs surviving as a species for long when they come in direct conflict with our new dietary requirements. Mankind has never been good at co-existing.
Sorry, not something people want to think about. A better idea would be to reduce the world’s population… sadly not something people want to think about either.
Looking back on what I just wrote I realise I must be having an even worse day then I thought….
April 30, 2008 at 1:17 pm
I took a new year’s resolution to not eat meat and I can proudly say I have stuck to it. I do still like meat but I just wanted to be healthy and spend less money next level: vegan
April 30, 2008 at 2:44 pm
I myself am a veggy, and find it difficult to convince my friends to do so. These statistics may help.
April 30, 2008 at 5:14 pm
Those are the same reasons I always hear. Let’s cover those first.
1. We wouldn’t be able to feed the entire world if we stopped eating meat. Following that trend of logic we could just grow more food to feed everyone, but no one gives out food for free. If we stopped eating meat we would just grow less food. And it should also be noted that we can’t survive 100% on grain, whereas you could survive solely on beef.
2. In my experience the people that switch to being a vegetarian do it because they believe it’s healthier, not to save money. And they have to spend a lot more money to limit the boredom with their new diet, and to keep it healthy (like eating organically grown foods).
3. First of all this is a bad comparison because a pound of beef is much healthier for you than a pound of wheat. The amount of nutrients in beef is much higher and the amount in wheat, especially processed wheat, is negligible. Plus, your body is much more efficient in processing meat so of those nutrients your body will accept more from the beef than the wheat. I can’t disagree with the fact that manure is pollutant, but following the logic again if there were less animal farms then there would be more wildlife and they would cause similar, although I agree lesser, pollution that the farmed animals do.
The real problem with a vegetarian diet is that we are designed to eat meat. That is the reason why meat tastes so good to us. It is true that we don’t have to eat meat though but that is just because we are so adaptable. For example, we can swim but that doesn’t mean we were designed to swim. For proper operating efficiency we need meat.
In a vegetarian (especially vegan) people rely on soy as their primary way to derive protein. The problem is that soy isn’t very good for us, and especially bad for men since it contains precursors for estrogen. This is one of the reasons why vegetarian men often act very homosexual. I also know many vegetarians and they all end up prematurely aging because they are not meeting the bodily requirements, which would be easy to meet with meat products but requires much more organization if relying solely on plant products.
The problem with our society isn’t eating meat. The problem I have is that we very cruelly kill our animals such as slitting their throats and allowing them to slowly die. I would prefer groups like PETA to stop operating as idealist terrorists and to have real goals such as cleaning up the food industry.
I respect vegetarians for sacrificing themselves for animals, but I wish that many of them (not all of them have it) would drop their holier-than-thou attitude because it does more to hurt their cause then help it.
April 30, 2008 at 5:29 pm
If only what you said was true…
> You could feed the entire world if you fed 100% of it to people!
Solving world hunger is not a trivial problem. If it were, it would have been solved already. People are certainly motivated enough.
Without going into all the mathematics and modeling, I’ll summarize the dilemma. All proposed solutions to world hunger that involve increasing the food supply are doomed to fail.
If the food supply increases, the population will increase proportionally to ensure the same rate of starvation. Ultimately, world hunger is not a problem of food production; it is a problem of population growth.
The human desire to reproduce, especially in overcrowded areas, is too great to be stopped by any means other than life-threatening ones. It is unfortunate, but true.
World hunger can only be solved by limiting populations. Most ways of doing this are evil. Using economic incentives are the least intrusive on human rights, but are also less effective and take much longer to work.
> You spend less.
Perhaps that is true for vegetables, but it is certainly not true for fruits. Most vegetarians are also “fruitarians” even though we haven’t coined that term.
It costs me about a dollar to eat a hamburger. That price includes the bun, ketchup, and meat shaped into burgers and packaged.
It costs me about $10 to eat fruit for lunch. Thats a bowl of mixed fruits (water melon, pineapple, honeydew, cantaloupe, grapes) and a small dish of strawberries. And I don’t even eat the honeydew and cantaloupe because they are yucky. I know the cost because I eat fruit for lunch almost every day for health and weight loss.
> You can drink cleaner water.
Water pollution is caused by growing fruits and vegetables as well. Especially since most of them are grown using pesticides. Not using pesticides would cause fruits/vegetables to cost much more, and will still lead to manure pollution. After all, fruits and vegetables are covered in insect feces that need to be washed off.
The solution to clean water is simply to build bigger and better water treatment plants. These plants are wonders of the world. The water they produce is cleaner than the most pristine streams. The only way to get cleaner water is to distill, and that costs a lot of energy and requires minerals to be added before being drunk to avoid hyperhydration (aka water poisoning).
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Ultimately, giving up meat all together isn’t necessarily a good idea. However, I think we can all agree that Westerners could benefit from cutting down on meat, especially fast food, fried food, and red meat.
April 30, 2008 at 8:21 pm
The problem is that we are currently producing food for more people than actually exist. Because of that, we are going to be even more over populated. And so now you’re saying that if everyone is vegetarian, we’ll be able to produce even MORE than the amount we’re already OVER producing?
Of course from a health and economic standpoint, I agree it makes more sense to eat a mostly vegetarian diet.
While its true that more people would be fed if the world only produced and ate vegetarian fare, I don’t think the people fed would be the ones that are starving now.
May 1, 2008 at 12:31 am
I recently learned that even if you just have to have that burger if you eat grass fed rather grain fed meat then it cuts down on the negative environmental impact and on the effects of rising food prices due to decreasing supply of primary materials.
May 3, 2008 at 4:53 pm
I think that the only real reason for not eating meat, unless you have special health concerns, is the moral reason of the way animals are treated before and when they are killed. What I have done is cut my meat consumption to a minimum. I’m not comfortable going vegetarian because I don’t think I would be able to get the nutrients I need, but I don’t make a habit of eating meat.
May 8, 2008 at 12:22 am
What happens to the animals that were eating this grain? Are you proposing that we cause extinction? Clean water has the same problem. These animals could not survive on their own, and would have no where to go.
May 9, 2008 at 6:53 pm
I’ll hit a few points in no particular order:
Many of the posters here are quick to forget that developed countries have lower rates of population growth than the developing countries that have the starvation problem in the first place.
By allotting a disproportionate amount of land for the purpose of raising livestock and to grow food for that livestock, we are necessarily robbing some people of even the option of feeding themselves. Arable land is an increasingly scarce resource and we must allocate it correctly to assure adequate supply.
You can imagine that as people in these poorer countries are finally allowed to eat, their quality of living will increase and perhaps their population growth curves will level off as well.
Red meat is also one of the worst kinds of food for your body. No, our bodies are not designed solely for meat. In fact, we have a long intestinal tract more characteristic of herbivores than of carnivores. The raising of meat is also highly inefficient. It’s pretty simple: cows eat more than people do. And how many meals does a cow eat before you get one steak out of it? How many people could you feed with all the resources going into producing just one steak for a fat, rich American?
Vernalax’s comment about vegetarian men acting homosexual does nothing but reveal his own bigotry and ignorance.
Vegetarians live several years longer, on average, than do meat eaters — surpassed only by pescatarians. If you’re going to eat meat, might as well pick the right kind.
I don’t see why Tim is so concerned about farm animals dying, when (1) we’re brutally killing them for meat anyway. (2) some people will no doubt keep them as pets. (3) vegetarianism makes more sense right now, but if more of the population were to reduce meat consumption, then the few people abstaining completely could start incorporating more meat into their diets. It’s a form of protest/compensation.
And for the record, I am not a vegetarian for animal rights, but for environmental and human ethics.
May 11, 2008 at 7:55 am
I don’t think humans were meant to eat meat,look at our teeth for a start.
Must say I felt so well as I cut out all animal products from my diet. Unfortunately it didn’t last long. I love Cheese and Chocolate too much.
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