Go Veggie and Help Others

·   The first precept is to not kill. When we eat animals, we are asking those who do not understand cause and effect to plant the seeds for much future suffering. 

·   Approximately 60 million people a year die of starvation. Those lives could be saved because those people could eat grain used to fatten cattle and other farm animals - if Americans ate 10% less meat.

·   It takes 16 pounds of grain to produce one pound of meat. If we all just ate the grain, everyone in the world would have enough to eat.

·   About 20 percent of the world's population, or 1.4 billion people, could be fed with the grain and soybeans fed to U.S. cattle alone. (Mark Gold and Jonathon Porritt, "The Global Benefits of Eating Less Meat," 2004, p. 22.)

·   The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations reported in 2006 that 854 million people across the world are hungry.

·   According to Dr. Waldo Bello, executive director of the Institute for Food and Development Policy, "[t]here is enough food in the world for everyone. But tragically, much of the world's food and land resources are tied up in producing beef and other livestock—food for the well-off—while millions of children and adults suffer from malnutrition and starvation. In Central America, staple crop production has been replaced by cattle ranching, which now occupies two-thirds of the arable land." Jeremy Rifkin, "The World's Problems on a Plate," The Guardian Unlimited, 17 May 2002.

·   Roughly 1,000 species a year become extinct because of the destruction of the rainforests.

·   Each of us switching to a vegetarian diet will eliminate the killing—and suffering—of more than 100 animals a year. It will also help to lessen the demand for future suffering as fewer animals are raised for our consumption.