Eating Meat Part One, The Easy Stuff.

In what I plan on being a long series of posts, I will attempt to explain why I personally do not eat meat and why other people should not. Of course I am not the master of the universe and I can't force my eating habits on other people. However, I think it is important for people to critically look at the impact of their eating habits and I think these posts will at uncover some of the issues behind eating meat.

For this post I am going to address the simplest and what I think is the most undisputable reason why to veg, meat destroys the environment. A 2006 United Nations report called the meat industry "one of the top two or three significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from global to local". When you dive through the literature about meat and the environment, it is obvious that there is no room for debate, meat has a huge negative effect on the environment. Here are some examples.

1.More than 260 million acres of U.S forest have been cleared to make room for grazing cattle.

2.It takes 16 pounds of grain to produce 1 pound of meat.

3. One third of raw materials and fossil fuels in the U.S goes into the meat industry.

4. A factory farm of about 5,000 animals produces the same amount of fecal waste as a city of 50,000 people. Vast quantities of fecal waste are toxic to humyn beings and increase polution.

5. The same United Nations report concluded the meat industry produces more greenhouse gases than all the SUV's, cars, planes, and ships in the world, COMBINED.

Now I don't want to hear "oh but meat tastes so good" because I am saving my response to that in another post. This post is more directed at all of those "environmental activists" out there that still consume meat.