Veg Mondays Good for the Future
Promote Global Sustainability
Our food choices are fundamental to sustainability. The easiest way to understand this connection is to ask a simple question: Does it take more resources to support 60 billion livestock animals (the number killed for meat worldwide every year) or to support the needs of 6 billion people?
To raise animals for food, the following resources are used:
- 70% of available water
- 80% of farmable land
- 70%
of grain and cereals grown (in the US)
The livestock industry is also responsible for:
- 51% of greenhouse gases
- 35,000 miles of polluted rivers (from hog, chicken, and cattle excrement)
- 400 dead zones in the oceans (from agricultural runoff)
- 60%
of deforestation in the Amazon
Taken together, these simple facts
are astonishing. The majority of resources are being used to support a meat-based diet. The biggest source of water pollution,
greenhouse gases, and deforestation is also the meat industry. A 2006 United Nations report
summarized the devastation caused by the meat industry by calling it
"one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the
most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global."
In addition to causing environmental
devastation, raising animals for food is grossly inefficient.
Animals eat large quantities of grain but they only produce small amounts
of meat, dairy products, or eggs in return. For example, it takes
approximately 15 pounds of grain to produce one pound of meat.
Yet that same amount of grain could feed 35 people. (www.goveg.com)
While over 900 million people are malnourished
and thousands of children die every day of starvation, we are feeding
most of our food to animals.
