Vegetarian Facts
Turning grain into flesh is extremely wasteful. Twenty vegetarians can be fed on the amount of land needed to feed one person on a meat-based diet.
More than one-third of all the raw materials and fossil fuels used in our country go to raise animals for food.
We have permanently lost 3/4 of U.S. topsoil; 85 percent of this loss is directly due to the raising of animals for food.
The price of meat would double or triple if the full ecological costs - including fossil fuel use, groundwater depletion and agriculture-chemical pollution - were included in the pricetag.
A typical hog factory farm generates raw waste equivalent to that of a city of 12,000 people. The waste from U.S. factory farms in a single year would fill 6.7 million train boxcars - enough to circle the Earth 12 and a half times.
Malnutrition and starvation will kill approximately 14 million people this year. If Americans reduced their intake of meat by just 10 percent, the land, water and energy freed up from growing livestock feed would feed 100 million people.
You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticide residues in the U.S. diet supplied by meat: 55%
Supplied by Dairy products: 23%
Supplied by vegetables: 6%
Supplied by fruits: 4%
Supplied by grains: 1%
(Source: http://foodrelief.tripod.com/v/veg1.htm) *According to the Environmental Protection Agency, factory farming pollutes U.S. waterways more than all industrial sources combined. *
Twenty-thousand pounds of potatoes can be grown on one acre of land, but only 165 pounds of beef can be produced in the same space.
More facts, most of them detailed in John Robbins' Pulitzer prize-nominated book, Diet for A New America:
Rainforests, vital to earth's oxygen supply, are being destroyed at an alarming rate - the top cause is the raising of animals for food.
Forty-five percent of the total land in this country is used to raise animals for food or crops to feed these animals.
A carnivorous diet requires 4200 gallons of water per day; a vegetarian one, 300 gallons per day.
Alas, what wickedness to have one living creature fed by the death of another... in the midst of such wealth as Earth, the best of Mothers, provides.
Pythagoras
