Recently I ran across a few articles and posts that claim a vegetarian diet is actually worse for the environment than the diet of a meat eater! Shocking and also very misleading. So I thought I’d look into each one of the arguments over the next few posts.
The argument usually goes like this:
1. It takes more land to grow all those vegetables than animal farming
2. More animals are displaced and bugs killed due to the growing of more vegetables
3. Importing vegetarian foods like tofu and plant based meats uses more resources than eating animal meat
I’ll start with the argument that it takes more land to grow all those veggies.
Ok, so let’s think about this. It takes 2.6 pounds of feed to produce one pound of beef, and it takes approximately 2 pounds of feed for every pound of chicken. So this would indicate that it takes on average over 2x the amount of farmed land to feed farmed animals than what it would take for a veggie diet.
Yes, I can hear you saying that animals are not fed only plant based food so this assumption of over 2x is not correct. Yes, it is very true and very, very sad that farmed animals do not only eat plants. The factory farming industry has made farm animals cannibals. Below is the list of ingredients such as animal waste, rendered animals, and chemicals that are added to what is fed to the various factory farmed animals that people eat. Please note that this reference is not from an animal rights site but from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. While not everything a farmed animal eats is grain, the vast majority of it is or it is from an rendered animal that was also on a similiar diet. So I don’t think we can claim that because not everything a farmed animal eats is grain the ratio of food to meat is exaggerated.
So if it takes about 2x as much to produce one pound of food from animals than it does from plants, and even though the food given to animals is not totally plant based, it is hard to argue that a vegan diet takes more land than a diet based on the slaughter of animals. And besides, does anyone really want to eat somthing that has eaten PCBs and rendered animals?
Thanks for that list of farmed animal feed ingredients. That makes it clear that eating meat is a lot like scavenging a hospital trash can. Marketing and steak sauce blind us to these things.
By: Rob on September 2, 2011
at 4:33 am
It is pretty sick isn’t it? Makes me think twice about ever kissing a meat eater on the mouth again
By: Debbie on September 2, 2011
at 9:01 pm
Vegetarian foods are the best since they are low in fat and are healthier. *
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By: Eloy Vanoli on November 25, 2012
at 6:55 am
Vegetarian meals do not deviate much from a regular diet except for the absence of meat. Skeptics argue that this could mean missing out on essential proteins. But this is hardly true nor correct. All healthy vegetarian recipes are well-balanced. They have the required amounts of essential vitamins, minerals, and protein. Examples of protein choices are legumes, nuts, beans, fish, poultry, dairy, and the popular tofu. Calcium, a mineral often associated with milk, is not missed either. Middle Easterners and native Africans are known to have strong teeth and bones but their diets rarely contain dairy or meat. They get their calcium from vegetables and root crops. So there is no reason you couldn’t get your calcium requirements from vegetarian foods. In terms of nutrition, a vegetarian diet is even superior to diets with meat. There is less fat and bacteria that enter the body which can cause heart diseases and infections. You can watch meat lover bloat and get fat while maintaining your own healthy body.*
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By: Emmett Piwetz on April 4, 2013
at 3:17 am