Meat/Beef
- Meat consumption is one of the leading causes of climate change, contributing more greenhouse gases than the entire transportation sector. Not only does it pose significant ethical qualms concerning the morality of eating itself, but also concerns for meat industry laborers' safety.
- Meat consumption is especially land and resource-intensive. Compared to growing nutrition heavy vegetables such as potatoes, rice, and wheat, meat demands hundreds of times more land and produces up to ten times more greenhouse gases. The land is not only required for the physical space for animals but also to grow the massive amounts of feed needed for the animals. Grazing animals can contribute to overgrazing, and therefore increased land loss
- Beef, particularly, is extremely environmentally hazardous.
- Beef is also responsible for deforestation as well as forest fires, as Amazonian cattle farmers purposefully burned acres of land to clear space for beef production. This habitat loss threatens biodiversity, including Animal waste runoff contaminated streams and other freshwater sources. We must also consider how strategy in what we eat can make great impacts on famine and food insecurity around the world. Currently, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that one in nine people are chronically undernourished, particularly attributed to land and resource constraints. Diets that are meat-centered as discussed above are more resource-intensive, and as climate change intensifies, the earth's resources further dwindle. Farmed animals consume more than five times as much food as human beings, much of the caloric intake going to their bodily functions and not actively being transformed into edible products, making animal agriculture a form of food waste.
- Meat also poses significant health risks, as red and processed meats specifically are heavily associated with cardiovascular disease, cancers, and diabetes.
- Vegan and vegetarian “meats'' have recently become easily imitable to the taste and texture people love. Check out Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods, Gardein, or Morningstar Farms. Swapping even one meal for a meatless option.
