Don't You Care About Human Problems?

 

Vegans help other humans on a tremendous scale every day with the choices they make. This little boy’s country exports grain to feed animals for YOUR steak. Edible grain that could be fed directly to him and his family. Did you know it takes anywhere from 5-20 times the amount of grain to make a small amount of animal protein? Eating meat greatly contributes to world famine and ecological destruction.

“Imagine sitting down to an eight-ounce steak...then imagine the room filled with 45-50 people with empty bowls in front of them. For the ‘feed cost’ of your steak, each of their bowls could be filled with a full cup of cooked cereal grains.”
- Diet for a Small Planet author Frances Moore Lappe
"Realize that 82 percent of the world's starving children live in countries where food is fed to animals, which are then killed and eaten by more well-off individuals in developed countries like the U.S., U.K., and in Europe. One-fourth of all grain produced by third-world countries is now given to livestock, in their own country and out."
- Dr. Richard Oppenlander

“Much as we have awakened to the full economic and social costs of cigarettes, we will find we can no longer subsidize or ignore the costs of mass-producing cattle, poultry, pigs, sheep and fish to feed our growing population. These costs include hugely inefficient use of freshwater and land, heavy pollution from livestock feces, rising rates of heart disease and other degenerative illnesses, and spreading destruction of the forests on which much of our planet’s life depends.”
- Time Magazine Report: Visions of the 21st Century, “Will We Still Eat Meat?”

A 2006 United Nations report “Livestock’s Long Shadow” summarized the devastation caused by the meat industry by calling it "one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global." The report also recommended that animal agriculture "be a major policy focus when dealing with problems of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity”…”As forests are cleared to create new pastures, livestock is a major driver of deforestation, especially in Latin America where some 70 per cent of former forests in the Amazon have been turned over to grazing."

“Though some 800 million people on the planet now suffer from hunger or malnutrition, the majority of corn and soy grown in the world feeds cattle, pigs and chickens. This despite the inherent inefficiencies: about two to five times more grain is required to produce the same amount of calories through livestock as through direct grain consumption, according to Rosamond Naylor, an associate professor of economics at Stanford University. It is as much as 10 times more in the case of grain-fed beef in the United States. The environmental impact of growing so much grain for animal feed is profound. Agriculture in the United States — much of which now serves the demand for meat — contributes to nearly three-quarters of all water-quality problems in the nation’s rivers and streams, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.”
- The New York Times “Rethinking the Meat Guzzler”

THESE ARE HUMAN PROBLEMS! This doesn’t even begin to cover the health effects, the water and land pollution, the climate change impact, the antibiotic resistance, the superbugs, the spreading dead zones in our water, etc. People really need to place a higher priority on being informed if they claim to care about ANYTHING – themselves, their children, their family and friends, their neighborhood, the air they breathe or the food they eat, or their entire planet.

Help the animals, help yourself, help your family, help starving children, help our ecosystem, help everything and everybody.

Face the reality, face the facts, and GO VEGAN.