Vegetarian eating

[Guest guest]

I wonder at the complete truth of the statistics, but I am sure there is merit

in this article.

 

Barb K.

 

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Huffington Post, read more here:

 

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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?

 

Other points:

 

Globally, we feed 756 million tons of grain to farmed animals. As Princeton

bioethicist Peter Singer notes in his new book, if we fed that grain to the 1.4

billion people who are living in abject poverty, each of them would be provided

more than half a ton of grain, or about 3 pounds of grain/day--that's twice the

grain they would need to survive. And that doesn't even include the 225 million

tons of soy that are produced every year, almost all of which is fed to farmed

animals. He writes, " The world is not running out of food. The problem is that

we--the relatively affluent--have found a way to consume four or five times as

much food as would be possible, if we were to eat the crops we grow directly. "

 

A recent United Nations report titled Livestock's Long Shadow concluded that the

meat industry causes almost 40% more greenhouse gas emissions than all the

world's transportation systems--that's all the cars, trucks, SUVs, planes and

ships in the world combined. The report also concluded that factory farming is

one of the biggest contributors to the most serious environmental problems at

every level--local and global.

 

Researchers at the University of Chicago concluded that switching from standard

American diet to a vegan diet is more effective in the fight against global

warming than switching from a standard American car to a hybrid.

 

In its report, the U.N. found that the meat industry causes local and global

environmental problems even beyond global warming. It said that the meat

industry should be a main focus in every discussion of land degradation, climate

change and air pollution, water shortages and pollution, and loss of

biodiversity.

 

Unattributed statistics were calculated from scientific reports by Noam Mohr, a

physicist with the New York University Polytechnic Institute.