Listen up, carnivores

All right. If you won't go vegetarian out of an ethical concern for animal suffering, how about doing it as your part in fighting global climate change? Do you realize that livestock production, processing, and transport together put an enormous amount of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere? I want to share with you an article called "Vegetarian is the New Prius" by Kathy Freston. I'll give you an excerpt here but I really want to encourage you to click through and read the whole thing:

Last month, the United Nations published a report on livestock and the environment with a stunning conclusion: "The livestock sector emerges as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global." It turns out that raising animals for food is a primary cause of land degradation, air pollution, water shortage, water pollution, loss of biodiversity, and not least of all, global warming.

That's right, global warming. You've probably heard the story: emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide are changing our climate, and scientists warn of more extreme weather, coastal flooding, spreading disease, and mass extinctions. It seems that when you step outside and wonder what happened to winter, you might want to think about what you had for dinner last night. The U.N. report says almost a fifth of global warming emissions come from livestock ... that's more emissions than from all of the world's transportation combined.
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Last year researchers at the University of Chicago took the Prius down a peg when they turned their attention to another gas guzzling consumer purchase. They noted that feeding animals for meat, dairy, and egg production requires growing some ten times as much crops as we'd need if we just ate pasta primavera, faux chicken nuggets, and other plant foods. On top of that, we have to transport the animals to slaughterhouses, slaughter them, refrigerate their carcasses, and distribute their flesh all across the country. Producing a calorie of meat protein means burning more than ten times as much fossil fuels--and spewing more than ten times as much heat-trapping carbon dioxide--as does a calorie of plant protein. The researchers found that, when it's all added up, the average American does more to reduce global warming emissions by going vegetarian than by switching to a Prius.

You know, it's not that hard. Here's how you do it: Simply choose a day a week to eat vegetarian. Painless. After a few weeks of that strategy, then pick two days a week and continue in that fashion until you abstain from meat entirely. There are lots of good vegetarian guide books and cook books on the market but I'll tell you what motivated me the most and that was reading Animal Liberation by Peter Singer. Once I realized how animals are treated by today's factory farming methods I knew I could no longer support the meat industry. Do it for your health, do it for the animals, do it for the planet. Come on - you know there's a part of you that knows this is the right thing to do. Become a vegetarian. You won't regret it.