Eating vegetarian or vegan significantly reduces the human impact on the environment. Every animal you eat requires land, fuel, and water in order to make it to your plate. Multiply that by thousands of animals in your lifetime. Raising animals for food actually produces more greenhouse gas emissions than cars and planes. It also uses 30% of the Earth’s land mass for grazing.
A recent report from the Worldwatch Institute revealed that more than half of global greenhouse-gas emissions come from animal agriculture. In fact, the carbon footprint of the typical meat eater is about 1.5 tons of CO2 larger than that of a vegetarian.
The United Nations said that if there was a global shift towards eating less meat, then it would lessen the effects of climate change. Keeping the animal alive uses up a lot of resources. For instance, about 1,850 gallons of water are needed to produce a pound of beef! On top of that, beef produces 30kg of greenhouse gas per kg of food.
Americans eat about four times as much meat as the global average. Alarming? I think so! We are eating way much more meat than necessary! To put this into perspective, when we compare the production of soy and meat, the results are staggering. ChooseVeg revealed that producing one pound of animal protein consumes about 12 times as much land, 13 times as much fossil fuel, and 15 times as much water- versus producing a pound of soy protein.
We consume, consume, consume, but what do we do to keep our Earth healthy? As consumers, we need to be aware of the environmental damage that our purchases and diets cause. There are plenty of ways to get protein from a vegetarian diet, so why not try implementing more vegetarian meals into your weekly diet? If you aren’t down to completely remove meat from your life, try going meatless one day a week! Any sort of impact helps this environmentally-conscious initiative.