A vegetarian diet is morally superior to one that includes industrially produced meat.
If everyone went vegetarian just for one day, the U.S. would save:
? 100 billion gallons of water, enough to supply all the homes in New England for almost 4 months;
? 1.5 billion pounds of crops otherwise fed to livestock, enough to feed the state of New Mexico for more than a year;
? 70 million gallons of gas–enough to fuel all the cars of Canada and Mexico combined with plenty to spare;
? 3 million acres of land, an area more than twice the size of Delaware;
? 33 tons of antibiotics.
If everyone went vegetarian just for one day, the U.S. would prevent:
? Greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 1.2 million tons of CO2, as much as produced by all of France;
? 3 million tons of soil erosion and $70 million in resulting economic damages;
? 4.5 million tons of animal excrement;
? Almost 7 tons of ammonia emissions, a major air pollutant.
My favorite statistic is this: According to Environmental Defense, if every American skipped one meal of chicken per week and substituted vegetarian foods instead, the carbon dioxide savings would be the same as taking more than half a million cars off of U.S. roads. See how easy it is to make an impact?
Each Lent I try to be better Christian in the hope that my seasonal piety will carry on after Easter. This year it is my intention to hold a permanent fast on meat. It is simply the morally right thing to do in our world that can no longer support meat consumption.
posted April 2, 2009 at 12:12 am
All the moral arguments of history cannot stand up against the taste of a good hamburger.
posted April 2, 2009 at 1:35 pm
I really doubt those numbers. If we were meant to be vegetarian why did God give us cannine and incisor teeth instead of just molars like a cow.
posted April 2, 2009 at 4:09 pm
Mother Earth News has a fabulous article this month on the “what if” we took all the crop land devoted to cattle feed for industrial farming operations and restored it to grassland for pasture raised and fed beef. Same number of cows, just no longer concentrated, more fertile soils, less pollution and the big scary co2, plus better quality and more healthy beef.
posted April 3, 2009 at 5:09 pm
There is an article called “Animals and their Jewish Guardians” by Sandra Nathan on the Tikkun Magazine website currently.
http://www.tikkun.org/article.php/Nathan
It is about Jewish voices for animal rights and how Jewish experience and beliefs can incorporate or call for considering vegetarianism and attempting to minimize the suffering of living beings. This can be lived as part of the call for ‘tikkun olam’ — healing the world.
posted January 4, 2011 at 12:27 am
Vegetarianism is another way for middle class white Protestants to feel good about themselves, another gimmick so that Mainline “activists” can feel “relevant”.