Go Veggie! for the planet

Everyone can pretty much guess that being a vegetarian is good for you health, but for the planet? Definitely! It affects more than you may realize. According to a study conducted by the United Nations in 2006, "the livestock sector emerges as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global." Chooseveg.com breaks it down perfectly into 4 major categories: conservation, extinction, pollution, and global warming.

Meat production in the United States is very inefficient and wasteful of our natural resources. Just think of all the crops that are simply produced to feed the animals that we are only raising to kill (I'll go into detail on that aspect in my ethics portion) so that we can eat them. A person living mostly on animal protein requires 10 times more land to produce food than someone living on vegetable proteins (wikipedia). So, that also means 10 times as much water is needed for that land. As a matter of fact, of all of the water used for any purpose in the US, more than half is used for livestock production. Just think about how much of the land and its resources we could conserve. Such an unnecessary waste. There is also a massive use of fossil fuels used to run all of the machinery now used to "raise" and "produce" livestock. Now, there are more energy efficient ways to produce meat using a natural-grazing method. The natural-grazing method is pretty much how we like to picture meat production...cows roaming free on a grassy hill...but that is not the reality anymore.

According to United States Department of Agriculture, in 1997, there were 1,315,051 farms that carried livestock.  That's crazy! Just imagine the acreage need for all of those farms to exist. How many forest were chopped down to make room for the fields needed to provide for all of this livestock? However, it is not just the trees we are losing, but also the countless animals, insects, and other plant life that were occupying that forest. The United Nations reports that "ranching-induced deforestation is one of the main reasons for the loss of plant and animal species in tropical rain forests." Think about it, the rain forests are being destroyed in order to clear land for cattle grazing, so we can over-indulge on double cheeseburgers and 16 oz steaks.

Then, there's the poo...seriously, the run-off from the farms is polluting our water making it toxic in some cases. The manure also produces methane gas, carbon dioxide, and nitrous oxide and releases it into the air. (Not to mention the amount of chemical fertilizers used on the crops grown to feed the cattle.) Methane gas, carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide are some of the most destructive gases in our air today and they are being produced at an alarming rate due to the incredible number of livestock needed to keep up with the high demands for meat.

Now, combine the effects of wasteful production, fewer forests, and higher levels of toxic gases and what do you get...global warming. In 2006, the United Nations reported that raising animals for food generates more greenhouse gases than all the cars and trucks in the world combined! So, maybe we should carpool AND put down the cheeseburger to reduce the effects of global warming!

Let's take care of this gorgeous planet God made for us! Reduce, reuse, and recycle...and Go Veggie!!!