Let’s talk about meat.
In January of 2016 I woke up and decided I was going to see how long I could go without eating meat. I had no reasons, no personal motivation, and no interest in the idea of being a vegetarian except I just wanted to test my own willpower. It wasn’t until I was wondering on the internet one day that I found the motherland of reasoning, motivation, and promotion of vegetarianism that made me decide I never wanted to eat meat again.
So let’s talk about meat and the environment.
WATER USAGE:
It takes an incredible amount of water to produce a single pound of meat. It takes more than 2,400 gallons of water to make one pound of meat, whereas it takes 244 gallons of water to make a pound of tofu. A cow being prepped for slaughter will drink an upwards of 50 gallons of water a day. If one person goes vegan, that person alone can save approximately 219,000 gallons of water a year.
POLLUTION:
Runoff from factory farms and grazing is one of the largest contributors to pollution in rivers and lakes. Animals raised in captivity produce more manure per year than the entire country combined, and with no proper disposal method of this waste, it either sits in manure lagoons on the property or is sprayed over the fields. Furthermore, pollution limits are oftentimes limited by these groups by spraying liquid manure in the air, which is then carried to neighboring lands, where residents are forced to breath in toxins and pathogens from the manure.
LAND USAGE:
By using land to fuel the animal agricultural business, we are losing vast amounts of land to a unnecessary corporations. In the United States alone, 56 million acres of land are used to grow feed for animals to fuel the animal agricultural industry, whereas only 4 million acres are used to grow food for humans. More than 90% of all Amazon rainforest that has been cleared since 1970 has been used for grazing livestock. It takes approximately 20 times less land to feed a vegan than it does a single meat eater.
MORE INFORMATION I WANT TO SHARE:
The United States alone could meet the caloric needs of 800 million people using purely the grains that are used to fuel the animals in the animal agricultural industry. If we use that logic and apply it, even conservatively, to a few other countries with large animal agricultural industries we could meet the caloric needs of everyone in the world.
We do not need meat to survive. As much as I loved Cookout chicken tenders, eating meat was not worth the environmental impact. We have a limited number of resources in the world- water, land, air- and it isn’t logical to me to continue to kill animals for other animals to eat when we don’t need to and it is incredibly damaging for the environment.
