Food is a vehicle for social change. Every choice you make in your daily diet is a political act. You can protect your health and the environment one bite at a time. Adopting a vegan diet and lifestyle, one free of animal products, is one of the most effective actions you can take to ease the strain on our earth’s limited resources, protect the planet from pollution, prevent global warming, promote compassion towards animals and save countless species from extinction.  

    Evidence of the environmental impacts and health effects of a meat-based diet is growing. If you don't eat meat you will:

• save massive amounts of water – 3,000 to 5,000 gallons of water for every pound of beef you avoid.
• avoid polluting our streams and rivers better than any other single recycling effort you do.
• avoid the destruction of topsoil.
• avoid the destruction of tropical forest.
• avoid the production of carbon dioxide.(your average car produces 3 kg/day of CO2 and the production of one hamburger produces 75 kg of CO2.)                                     
  
• reduce the amount of methane gas produced.
• reduce the destruction of wildlife habitat.
• help to save endangered species.
• reduce fossil fuel consumption and promote energy conservation.

    The way they breed animals in the industrialized factory farms pollutes our environment while consuming huge amounts of water, grain, petroleum, pesticides and drugs. Livestock now produces 130 times the amount of waste that people do. It is infused with disease bearing organisms. Animals are raised in close confinement, herded together on huge feedlots, crowded, filthy, stinking places with open sewers and choking air. These animals do not graze on grass, as bucolic images tell us; they can’t graze at all.

     The Facts:
   
FOSSIL FUEL/ENERGY CONSUMPTION

     The burning of fossil fuels releases CO2, one of primary gases responsible for global warming. A factory cow is a fossil fuel machine requiring fossil fuels to:

• heat buildings that house the animals
  
• produce all the crops that feed the animal
• transport, process and refrigerate all the meat

     A Cornell scientist estimates that animal protein demands eight times as much fossil fuel than for comparable amount of plant protein. It isn’t just cows that produce this waste. Factory-raised hogs produce four times the waste in North Carolina as the 6.5 million people of that state do.

• growing feed for farmed animals requires intense use of synthetic fertilizers manufactured with fossil fuels. This process emits tremendous amount of CO2 the fertilizer releases nitrous oxide a greenhouse gas that is 296 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
• a plant based diet (like beans for example) uses 1/27 of the amount of fossil fuel it takes to produce one calorie of energy from beef. You get the same energy from eating beans as you do from eating beef, but bean production takes only 4% of the carbon dioxide that beef does to produce.
  

LOSS OF HABITAT /SOIL EROSION

    Most of us don’t think about the rainforest when we eat, but an area equivalent to seven football fields of that habitat is destroyed every minute to make room for grazing cattle in rainforests around the globe. And closer to home:

• more than 260 million acres of U.S. forest have been cleared for grain to feed farmed animals.
• More than two-thirds of the land area of the mountain states are used for grazing.
• 70% of the lands in western national forests are grazed.
• 90% of Bureau of Land Management land is graze.

     These lands are trampled by the cattle, compacting the soil. When it rains, the land doesn’t absorb the water. Instead, it runs off, taking away topsoil, forming deep gullies and damaging streambeds. The U.S. certainly isn't alone in its misuse of land for animal agriculture.  Countries across the globe are bulldozing huge swaths of land to make more room for animals and the crops to feed them. From tropical rain forests in Brazil to ancient pine forests in China, entire ecosystems are being destroyed to fuel our addiction.

SPECIES LOSS

    Livestock grazing is the number one cause of threatened and extinct species both in the United States and in other parts of the world. Cattle ranching has done more to alter the type of vegetation and land forms of the West than all the water projects, strip mines, power plants, freeways, and subdivision developments combined. It is true that species die off all the time.  Normally, the Earth has lost 10 to 25 species per year. But in the billions of years of life on this Earth, we have had five periods of major extinctions; the last one was 67 million years ago, when, possibly because of a meteor colliding with the Earth, we lost the dinosaurs. But now there’s a sixth extinction, and it is not caused by a meteor, but by human beings. And this is a big one; we are losing several thousand species per year, and maybe tens of thousands. 

• 25% of mammalian species are endangered.
• But what’s much more endangered, or wiped out already, are the plants, including varieties of plankton, fungi, bacteria and insects, that are fundamental to all so-called higher forms of life. All life will unravel if these creatures are wiped out.

WATER PROTECTION

    The meat industry is major source of water depletion. It takes 14 gallons to produce a pound of wheat. It takes 441 gallons of water to produce a pound of meat. As more water is diverted to raising pigs and chickens instead of producing crops for direct consumption, millions of wells are going dry. India, China, North Africa and the US are all running freshwater deficits. It is estimated that it takes 2,500 to 5,000 gallons of water to produce 1 pound of beef and that livestock in general produces 130 times the amount of waste that people do. In California 65% of the population is threatened by pollution in drinking water just from dairy cow manure. And in North Carolina factory-raised hogs produce four times more waste than all of the 6.5 million people living there. Consider this - you would save more water by not eating one pound of beef, than you would by not showering for an entire year. Pass up one hamburger and you’ll save as much water as you save by taking low-flow nozzle

GLOBAL WARMING

    The tens of billions of farmed animals produce massive amounts of manure which emit green house gases such as methane, nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide. The burps and flatulence produced by the livestock industry emit huge quantities of methane; almost one fifth of global methane emissions. Methane has 23 times global warming potential of CO2.

Your average car produces 3 kg/day of CO2. To clear rainforest to produce beef for one hamburger produces 75 kg of CO2. Eating one pound of hamburger does the same damage as driving your car for more than three weeks. Every second of every day, one football field of tropical rainforest is destroyed in order to produce 257 hamburgers.

WORLD HUNGER

    The 4.8 pounds of grain fed to cattle to produce one pound of beef for human beings represents a colossal waste of resources in a world still teeming with people who suffer from profound hunger and malnutrition. There are now 20 billion head of livestock taking up space on our earth, more than three times the number of people and we are feeding more than 70 percent of the grain and cereals we grow to farmed animals. The Union of Concerned Scientists says one of the things people can do that would most help the environment, is to not eat beef and especially animal product produced on a factory farm.

    Harvard nutritionist Jean Mayer estimates that reducing meat production by just 10 percent in the U.S. would free enough grain to feed 60 million people. Feeding large amounts of grain to farmed animals in order to produce a small amount of meat is an inefficient waste of limited resources. Producing a single hamburger patty uses enough fuel to drive 20 miles and causes the loss of five times its weight in topsoil.

POULTRY INDUSTRY

    The poultry industry forces birds to live in filth  and often sick birds remain untreated.  This is another food to avoid as well as eggs. (If purchasing eggs, purchase the free range and organic products.) These farming practices allow diseases to spread Chicken factory farms force birds to live in filth and extreme confinement. In an attempt to minimize costs, and maximize profit, even the sickest of hens are denied veterinary care. Hens are left to die a slow, and often agonizingly painful, death from sickness and injury. Ninety-eight percent of eggs are produced from hens forced to live in cages.

FINANCIAL RAMIFICATIONS

    Fast food restaurants are a popular choice in many American households.  As Eric Schlosser noted in his best-selling book Fast Food Nation, Americans now spend more money on fast food - $110 billion a year - than they do on higher education. They spend more on fast food than on movies, books, magazines, newspapers, videos and recorded music - combined.”

    As you can see, there are many compelling reasons to make the choice to “Go Vegan”. It’s not always easy to do, but the change gets easier as we better understand the results of our actions. And you don’t have to give up tastes you love. There are healthy and humane alternatives to almost every meat, dairy and egg product. You can at least get started going to all veggie diet then progress to vegan! Check out these helpful resources below.

LINKS

Vegan Starter Kit

Choose Veg   

North American Vegetarian Society 
 
Veg Source
Educates the public about the vegan lifestyle and diet.

Vegetarian Resource Group
The world's first vegan society.  Provides fact sheets on topics including nutrition and health.

The Vegan Society
The Society promotes vegan lifestyles - ways of living that seek to exclude, as far as is possible and practical, all forms of exploitation of animals for food, clothing or any other purposes.

Vegan  Essentials
Where compassion meets convenience.

American Vegan Society
Together we explore and apply compassionate living concepts, and reflect on them and ourselves. We learn how to revere the Earth, how to save the animals, and how to care for ourselves. People follow a vegan lifestyle for ethical reasons, for health, for the environment.

 Go Veg
Your source for great-tasting vegan and vegetarian recipes, information on all aspects of vegan and vegetarian living and news.