Some people become vegetarians because they simply find meat unappetizing – chewing and digesting hunks of animal flesh isn’t their idea of fine dining. And that’s a perfectly valid reason to embrace a meatless lifestyle. But for many others, vegetarianism is part of their commitment to living theirs lives with as much environmental, moral and political responsibility as possible – and becoming a vegetarian is a natural part of that resolve.
In fact, just because humans can digest meat and metabolize the protein, that doesn’t mean that we were designed to eat meat as a primary nutritional source. Yes, we can eat meat – but the way our bodies are built shows that we function more efficiently on plant foods. One clue is the design of our teeth. If you examine the teeth of true carnivorous animals, theirs are long, sharp and pointed in the front for the purpose of tearing away flesh. Our so-called "canine" teeth – the four teeth in the front corners of our mouths – are very poorly designed for the task when you compare them to the teeth of dogs, cats, lions and wolves. Human teeth are short, blunt and only very slightly rounded on top – not designed to tear at meat at all! Similarly, the lower jaws of meat-eating animals open very wide but move very little from side-to-side, adding power and stability to their bite. Like other plant-eating animals, our jaws not only open an close but also move forwards, backwards and side-to-side, designed to bite off pieces of plant matter and then grinding it into smaller pieces with our flat molars.
But the most important evolutionary development that sets humans apart from other animals is our huge, overdeveloped brain. We have the ability to choose what we eat and how we live – we aren’t just eating machines forced by the circumstances of nature to eat a specific diet. As a human, you can make decisions based on science, ethics, morals and good old fashioned common sense.
Every choice you make has repercussions, from the excess packaging that you toss in the trash (plastic and cardboard that ends up in a landfill) to the light bulbs that you use (most likely manufactured by a company that supplies nuclear triggers to bomb manufacturers). The food you choose to eat is no exception. In our industrialized Western world, meat appears in tidy wrapped packages in our grocer’s case so we don’t have to think about where it came from – the resources used to raise the animal, the additives pumped into feed to increase production, and the manner in which the animals live and die. But every time you buy meat, you support the system that created it – and chances are, you have no idea just what that entails!
What’s the Beef with the Cattle Industry?
One of the most eye-opening revelations in Frances Moore Lappé’s provocative 1971 book, "Diet for a Small Planet" was the information she provided on the environmentally disastrous impact of the beef industry. One of the biggest effects is on the groundwater supplies that provide the water we use for drinking, cooking and bathing. In the United States alone, the various underground water tables are dropping from six inches to six feet per year. And even as our water supplies are dwindling, almost half of the water used in the U.S. each year is used to irrigate land to grow food – with vast quantities of that going to produce the grain that’s fed to farm animals.
The rate of return – the amount of food we get for the amount of water we use – on animal protein is pretty poor. As an example, it takes about 23 gallons of water to produce a pound of tomatoes. Compare that to the estimated 2,000 gallons of water used to produce a pound of beef. In her book, Lappé called cattle a "protein factory in reverse," meaning they consume more protein than they provide! For every pound of beef that a steer provides, it eats seven pounds of grain and soy protein – so doesn’t it make more environmental sense to just eat the grains? As global warming due to air pollution becomes an ever more dire development, scientists are looking not only to the pollutants caused by cars and factories, but to that caused by factory farming as well. Cattle produce methane gas (and if you’ve ever driven past a stockyard, you know how dense that gas can be!) and methane makes up 9 percent of the gasses contributing to the greenhouse effect – approximately 70 to 80 tons of methane per year.
They also produce waste high in nitrous oxide, another factor in global warming. In fact, animal waste is the largest source of environmental emissions of nitrous oxide, making up 95 percent. Cattle farming in rainforest areas contributes to global warming, too, as more and more rainforest is leveled to create pastures for grazing. And the runoff from cattle farms – containing nitrogen, phosphorous, waste-borne pathogens and detergents – often flows directly into the waterways, destroying fish habitats and leaching into the groundwater that provides our drinking water supplies.
Then there’s the massive use of fossil fuels required to get beef to market. Today’s massive, high-tech factory farms burn fuel to run the machinery that provides heating, lighting and cooling, in addition to the gasoline that fuels the trucks that deliver the feed, transport the cattle and deliver the meat to market. The Worldwatch Institute estimates that it takes about 48 gallons of gasoline per American, per year, to provide the red meat and poultry that we eat.
Old McDonald Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
Ah, the pastoral pleasures of farm life! Fluffy sheep grazing contentedly in the fields, the chickens clucking in the henhouse and the pigs happily munching away at the family’s leftovers from their communal trough. Everyone’s happy and healthy and doing their part for the cycle of life. Right?
Unfortunately, it’s not at all like that. At least, not in this day and age of mass-quantity factory farms where the well-being of animals isn’t considered – the only issue is how to harvest as much meat for market as possible per square foot of land. And to that end, farmers now forgo traditional grazing practices, packing as many animals as possible into crowded feedlots, where they do nothing throughout their short lives but eat tons of grain and drink thousands of gallons of water.
Dairy cows are often treated better than beef cattle, but not much – increasingly, dairy farmers are keeping their cows housed inside barns their entire lives, where they develop leg and hoof problems due to standing in once place on cement floors. Cows today are also forced to produce more milk than ever before, being constantly milked by machines with little rest from the process, giving them painfully inflamed udders. The forced milk production shortens their lives, too – when treated well, cows can live for up to 20 years, producing milk for over half their life. Today’s dairy cows are so overmilked that they can only produce for three or four years, after which time they’re sent to the slaughterhouse.
Cows aren’t the only animals to suffer under factory farming practices. Chickens are treated especially poorly, living their entire lives in cramped confinement, crowded so closely together that they’re "debeaked" – their beaks snapped off with a machine tool – so that they don’t harm each other with their hysterical pecking. Debeaked chickens have difficulty eating, which isn’t surprising, and live in such terrible conditions that they’re forced to eat their own and other chickens’ feces along with their food, contributing to the wide variety of potentially deadly bacteria that gets passed onto the consumer.
Besides the debeaking, another unpleasant practice is "molting." Chickens produce more eggs when they’re shedding their feathers, so egg farmers induce the state by starving the birds for up to twelve days at a time. Besides being inhumane, some researchers have concluded that forced molting increases chickens’ levels of salmonella. This also assists egg farmers in weeding out the weaker hens – about 3 percent of chickens die of starvation during the forced molting process.
In fact, the entire egg-production process starts with killing – male chicks have no function on a modern egg farm and are "culled" by workers whose job consists of identifying male chicks and tossing them, while still alive, into machines that grind them up and add them to the hens’ feed. Practices like this, along with molting and debeaking, have caused enough of a public outcry that even the McDonald’s Corporation couldn’t ignore it – in 2000, the fast food giant sent letters to the farmers who provide the over 1.5 billion eggs that they use each year, demanding that chickens be housed in larger cages and that forced molting be stopped.
How This Little Piggy Gets to Market
Pigs are one of the most intelligent of the domesticated beasts, friendly and gregarious. Those who raise pigs – the ones who care about their animals – say that they’re as smart and as loving as dogs or cats, enjoying music, basking in the sun and playing with toys. They’re also very clean animals who only "wallow" in mud to cool off and keep away flies. All of which makes it especially horrifying when you learn how they’re treated in factory farms.
Mother pigs on farms in the United States live out most of their lives in "gestation" crates that are just 7 feet long by 2 feet wide, too small for them to even turn around. They display signs of boredom and stress when contained in such a manner, biting the bars of the cage and gnashing their teeth – piglets’ tails are often routinely cut off so they won’t bite each other’s tails, a neurotic behavior that only occurs in confinement. Piglets are taken away from their mothers three weeks after birth, then packed into pens until they are singled out to be raised for breeding or for meat. Often, the piglets’ teeth are chipped off with pliers to further discourage them from biting each other.
For transport, pigs are stuffed into trucks with no food or water and without any temperature regulation, subjecting them to extremes of heat or cold. During the freezing midwestern winters, they often freeze to the sides of the trucks or die from dehydration. According to numbers provided by the pork industry, over 100,000 pigs die on their way to slaughterhouses each year, and over 400,000 arrive crippled due to barbaric transport practices.
At the slaughterhouse, the pigs are stunned with an electrical charge to their brain or heart which, when done correctly, renders them immediately unconscious before they’re tossed into tanks of scalding water which softens their skin and removes their hair. Stunning is often done incorrectly, however – meaning that the pigs are still conscious and already in severe pain when they’re thrown into the scalding water. Audits of factory farms by the USDA and independent organizations continually find scores of humane slaughter violations, including one PETA investigation that uncovered a plant in Oklahoma where workers killed pigs by slamming the animals heads against the floor and beating them with hammers.
Vegetarianism – The Thoughtful Alternative
There are many, many benefits that you’ll see immediately by becoming a vegetarian, including clear skin, shiny hair and lower risk of high cholesterol, diabetes and kidney disease. But the wider benefit is the one you can’t see – the benefit to the rest of the world. Keep the following in mind when you feel tempted to go back to eating meat ...
You’re helping to conserve water. Water is the earth’s most precious resource, and currently about 50 percent of the water in the United States is used to grow crops for grain-fed animals – as opposed to 35 percent that’s used to grow food crops for humans to eat. It takes roughly 15 times as much water to produce the same amount of protein from an animal that we can get from plant sources. Switching to a vegetarian diet is the single biggest thing that you can do to cut down on your consumption of water.
You’re helping to protect the land. Livestock grazing erodes topsoil, drying out the land and making it unusable for other farming. This is one reason why forests are clear-cut at an alarming rate to make room for more cattle grazing – agriculture accounts for nearly 90 percent of the 30 million acres of rainforest that are destroyed each year. Nearly 25 percent of all prescription drugs have a basis in rainforest plants – destroying the rainforest may mean destroying our chances of curing cancer or AIDS.
You’re helping to conserve fossil fuels. In this supply-and-demand world, less demand means less production, which means less consumption of fossil fuels. More than a third of the fossil fuels used in the United States are used by animal agriculture – a calorie of animal protein requires ten times as much fuel as needed to produce a calorie of plant protein. Researchers at the University of Chicago compared the amount of fossil fuel needed to cultivate and process various foods, fuel that’s used to operate agricultural machinery, provide food for livestock and irrigate crops. They also factored in emissions of methane and nitrous oxide produced by cows, sheep and manure treatment. According to the findings, the average American diet that consists of about 28 percent animal foods generates the equivalent of 1.5 tons more carbon dioxide each year than a comparable vegan diet.
The researchers pointed out that driving a hybrid car rather than an average vehicle would conserve a little over one ton of carbon dioxide per year – meaning that living a vegan lifestyle reduces more emissions than driving a hybrid car!
You’re making a more compassionate choice. Now that you’ve read about the horrors of factory farming, is that slice of bacon really worth it? There’s a famous quote from George Bernard Shaw: "When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity." Many people believe that we have a natural right to kill and eat animals, but think of it this way – imagine a time when an alien species visits our planet.
They’re smarter than we are, and have technology far more advanced of our own. And they like to eat meat. So humans become the factory-farmed animals, taken to slaughterhouses – as we cry and scream and fight to no avail – and we’re shoved into pens until such time as we’re marched onto the killing floor, bashed in the head and stripped of our flesh, which is then neatly packaged up for market. It’s a horrible thought – yet that’s what humans do to animals every day. St. Francis of Assisi said, "If you have men who will exclude any of god’s creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men." Choosing a vegetarian lifestyle is choosing the path of compassion.
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.
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