The Pros And Cons Of Animal Food

Being vegetarian or vegan is not only beneficial to the animals that are being slaughtered but it also beneficial to the earth and helps to reduce global warming. According to Wikipedia, there are more than seven billion people and out of those seven billion people only three hundred and seventy five million people are said to be vegetarian or vegan. This mass slaughter of animals and livestock is also one of the leading causes of global warming. People may think that the earth is slowly dying but that is not the case anymore as global warming has caught up with us. According to NASA, there are 406.94 parts per million of carbon di oxide in the atmosphere the highest it has ever been in 650000 years. The global temperature has risen by 1.7 °F and sixteen out of the seventeen warmest years on earth have been recorded since 2001. The arctic ice minimum has decreased by 13.2% per decade and in 2012 arctic summer sea ice shrank to the lowest extent on record. The global sea level has also grown by 3.4 millimeters per year and the global average sea level has risen nearly 178mm over the past 100 years. These statistics show you how quickly global warming and climate change are having an effect on earth and who knows what the stats will be in another 50 to 100 years the earth may become uninhabitable and humans will be the sole reason for this.

More than 150 billion animals are slaughtered each year. “Every year in America, without mercy, we murder 10 billion land animals, and 18 billion marine animals. Not for health, survival, sustenance or self-defense. People eat meat, cheese, milk and eggs for 4 reasons: habit, tradition, convenience, and taste.” (Yourofsky). Making people go vegan for a month or years, can significantly drop the high amount of animal cruelty that happen each day. This can cause an growth in the animal population. It can help animals live a happy life instead of being trap in a slaughterhouse waiting for their

While vegetarianism has been proven to help environmental, health, and animal rights impacts, some people believe it to be too extreme. While vegetarianism claims to be helping the environment, there may be environmental problems associated with non-meat products. Stated before, animal agriculture produces greenhouse gas emissions. The farming of soybeans, which vegetarians fulfil their protein needs with, also has environmental impacts (Coogan,T.). Due to the increase in vegetarianism, there has also been an increase in the demand for soybean farming. Soybean farms have taken over many rainforests and diverse ecosystems (Coogan,T.). Ultimately, the creation of soybean farms destroys biodiversity. Biodiversity is necessary for ecosystems to

Going vegetarian can help preserve the limited land and water system that us humans take for granted sometimes. Factory farming along with free range farming are destroying the earth and its biodiversity. When people think of pollution like unnecessary CO2 emissions and deforestation of rainforests, they do not think about the animals being raised for consumption. In an article, “Concentrated animal Agriculture Is The Biggest

No industry has seen the level of dramatic, exponential growth and change over the past three decades as animal agriculture. The present day global society and its accompanying hunger for flesh and other animal derived products has forced the production and husbandry of animals to adapt in order to satisfy this high demand. Modern farming practices are far from the idealized, picturesque image that is frequently portrayed in American media and advertising. Animal production in the United States has been industrialized, and consequently the adverse effects of large scale production and industry are taking their toll in new and devastating ways. A nation which was once saturated with small farms and farmers who supplied to the local

Veganism has grown into a widespread trend in the last 70 years; in fact, in the United States approximately 3% of the population reports that they do not eat meat and about a third of this group declare themselves as vegan (Singer and Mason 187). Factory farming is an intensive method of farming that results in inexpensive meat products at the expense of one’s health, the environment, and animals (“Factory Farms”) . Moreover, this form of farming has led to the slow destruction of the planet, the mistreatment of animals, and the increase of various health diseases. Veganism is increasing due to the exposure of the secondary effects caused by industrialized

"Cowspiracy" is a documentary by Kip Anderson and Keegan Kuhn.   The film explores the multi billion dollar cattle industry, specifically focusing on cows. For years environmental organizations and the government have encouraged society to car pool, ride bikes, take quick showers, conserve electricity and water, compost, and recycle. But is this enough? What if cows in actuality are the leading cause of pollution?

Meat consumption is a big area where individuals can drastically reduce their environmental impact. I’m neither vegan nor vegetarian, but I don’t begrudge people that are. It is hard to deny that being part of one of the aforementioned groups generally lessens a person’s impact. In fact, the Environmental Working Group and USDA put out a land breaking study in 2011 which detailed the impacts of an omnivorous diet. My favorite part of this article though is that it does not take the typical approach and admonish everyone for eating meat and demand a change, but instead advocates for a reduction in consumption. If that article seems a bit daunting, this one gives some good quick hits from it. Regardless of where you fall on the eating meat spectrum, realistically it is not practical to demand or assume everyone will just drop eating meat. It has become too much of a fixed staple in the typical

For thousands of years people have been consuming meat. A big part of people’s culture is focused around food and family, and disrupting that can be insensitive. Humans have evolved to a population by manipulating the environment, that being the use technology. Animal byproducts are what humans live on and contain essential nutrients on which humans thrive on. It provides a dense amount of calories, protein, and minerals in which is essential to survive. Animal agriculture was the driving force of human development, because there was an ability to constantly provide adequate food to the population. This allowed free time, innovations, explorations, and eventually the world in which we live. Meat also provides economic stimulus with in our world, but that has some drawbacks. As a country’s wealth develops, so does its consumption of animals, and studies have shown that this has a direct impact on the environment. Factory farming can have a substantial effect on the environment, by gas emissions, carbon use, and water pollution -just to name a few. The pros and cons can be pretty equal or out of proportion depending on one’s predisposition on the topic.

Firstly,animals uses 3 to 15 times as much water than plant vegetation and secondly eating meat increases the chances of you getting heart disease America’s #1 killer.Humans loves animals but why do you kill them or eat them? and also cows gives us milk, chickens gives us eggs and cows or goats milk makes cheese and suddenly out of nowhere no more animals no more milk,no more eggs nothing just nothing because us humans ate them. Oh yea also do you want to be obese? statistics show that 60% of saturated fat comes from meat. another

There is a lot of credence to this statement. Look at this way, animal agriculture has done a lot to contribute to the woes we are facing as a result of climate change because animal greenhouse gases contribute a sizable percentage of emissions clouding the planet. Taking the vegan route as it were, comes with obvious benefits like a reducing the individual carbon footprint and opportunity to eat more nutritious and fresher foods. In deed studies have shown that people on vegan diet have lower levels of cholesterol levels and are able to maintain healthy body weight.

For one, people began to wonder exactly how their hamburger was prepared, and where it was coming from. If you do your research you’ll find that factory farming is extremely cruel and inhumane. Dairy cows only produce milk for their young, so to boost the production of milk, farmers impregnate through artificial insemination annually, which can lead to stress, illness, and even death. “Nearly 100% of calves

In a study conducted by The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2003, it was estimated that there are approximately 2 billion people that live primarily on a meat-based diet while approximately 4 billion people live primarily on a plant-based diet (Pimentel, 2003). With this information we can deduce just how much of a difference in environmental effects there are between a vegetarian diet and a diet that consumes meat. For example, in this study it was found that the average amount of fossil fuel energy used for 1 kilocalorie of animal-based protein was 11 times more than that for 1 kilocalorie of grain protein. This statistic shows that the mass production of animal meat-based foods requires a much larger amount of the already limited amount of fossil fuels that are on Earth than plant-based food. By examining this fact, it is not a broad leap to assume that in reducing the worlds extravagant use of animal meat for consumption we could not only preserve the natural resources we have but also assist in reducing factors that add to climate change. Although the argument could be made that because both the vegetarian diet and a diet with meat in it use a large amount of resources there would be no difference in reducing the effects that the agriculture industry has on climate change but that is simply not true. While it is true that both diets use a large amount of resources, across the board the meat-based diet uses a much larger amount of resources. In fact, in the study conducted by The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition it states, “The meat-based diet requires more energy, land, and water resources than the lactoovovegetarian [vegetarian] diet.” Although both are considered unsustainable, this study provides very valid evidence that the vegetarian diet is more sustainable than that of a meat-based

Cows are destroying our planet?! According to Margaret Lundberg they are. In Lundberg’s essay “Eating Green” the author states her belief “that our personal and global health [are] tightly interconnected, and what benefits one will benefit the other” (Lundberg 570). Lundberg than goes on to explain why a vegetarian diet will restore the environment. She lacks a realistic solution for her American meat-obsessed audience. Lundberg also used unreliable sources to over emphasize the effects that the meat industry has on the environment as well as shows no evidence that a vegetarian diet is actually good for the environment.

Consumption of meat by humans creates several problems. First and foremost, raising animals for food compromises the environment. For example, it takes a large amount of natural resources to sustain the meat industry. The use of water, land, and food to raise animals for human consumption is not an efficient use of our limited resources. In contrast, it is more efficient to feed humans directly than to use land, food, and water to feed animals to be used as food. There are shortages of fertile land, clean water, and food in several third world countries. Many of these countries’ resources are allocated to produce feed for animals in developed countries around the world. As a result, the citizens of these countries are stricken with water and food shortages, while their crops are feeding cattle from across the globe. However, this problem can be solved by adopting a vegan diet. The vegan diet will allow a more efficient use of resources that in turn can be used to feed starving men, women, and children throughout the world. Consequently, more people in the world could be fed if the land used to grow feed for animals was used to grow food for humans.