Food for Thought: One Meatless Meal a Week

Imagine yourself outside on a sunny day at a picnic. You take out your ham and cheese sandwich and take a big bite. You have no idea of the damage that's been done to put that sandwich in your picnic basket.

In today's world, the meat and dairy you buy at the store doesn't come from bright cheerful farms with boundless green fields and happy animals running around. It comes from cold gray factories, full of terrified animals abused in a number of ways. It comes from dangerous chemicals spilling into our air and water, poisoning anyone and anything nearby.

Ninety-seven percent of all ten billion animals abused and killed every year are farm animals. Young calves are torn away from their mothers and subjected to painful mutilations such as dehorning, castration, and branding. They are forced to produce ten times more milk than they would naturally. Ninety-five percent of egg-laying hens spend their lives in battery cages, which hold five to ten birds in a very small space, their beaks removed to make room in these crowded cages. Turkeys, said by Benjamin Franklin to be a "bird of courage" and "a much more respectable bird," are overbred and forced to grow rapidly to a weight three times the weight of wild turkeys. They are given less than three square inches of cage space. Piglets are taken away from their mothers at just 17 to 20 days old and female pigs are continually kept pregnant, kept in 18 to 24 inch cages where they can hardly move. Even fish suffer in factory aquafarms. Salmon farms have 50,000 individuals in space the size of a bathtub and fish are often fed waste products left behind from slaughterhouses, foods they would never eat in the wild.

As for the environment, factory farms use about 5.5 gallons of fossil fuels per acre, which emit 90 million tons of carbon dioxide into the air. Our current global food system depends on fossil fuels, which have led to climate change and other disastrous effects. 37 percent of methane emissions come from factory farms and as much as 80 percent of nitrogen from manure lagoons ends up in the air. When animal waste is stored by factory farms in these large, open-air lagoons, leaks and spills are likely to happen. In 1995, 25 million gallons of liquid manure spilled into the New River in North Carolina, killing 10 million fish. Water is also very overused on factory farms; producing one pound of beef takes about 1,581 gallons of water, the same amount the average American uses in 100 showers. Additionally, forests and habitats are taken down to make space for these industrial giants. Fields for livestock in the U.S. have cleared over 260 million acres of forest. About 40 percent of all Central American rainforests have been destroyed to create pastures for beef cattle.

But there is a way YOU can help change this. By changing the way you eat, you can eliminate cruelty from your diet. By eating vegan or vegetarian, you stop supporting factory farms. Even one meatless meal a week can make a difference. If every American removed just one serving of chicken a week from their diet, the same amount of carbon dioxide emissions would be saved as taking 500,000 cars off the road. To make one quarter pound burger, it takes 6.7 pounds of grain, 52.8 gallons of water, 74.5 square feet of land, and 1,036 BTUS of fossil fuels, so just eating one less burger a week can save a whole lot.

Need help finding vegan recipes? Never fear! Each week, I will post a new recipe for you to try with a full FREE downloadable vegan cookbook coming soon to be available through this website.

Stop supporting animal and environmental cruelty today!

Works Cited:

“Chickens.” Farm Sanctuary. Web. 06 May 2016.

“Cows.” Farm Sanctuary. Web. 06 May 2016.

“Factory Farming and the Environment.” Farm Sanctuary. Web. 06 May 2016.

Good, Kate. “5 Ways Factory Farming Is Killing the Environment.” One Green Planet. N.p., Apr. 2014. Web. 11 May 2016.

Halverson, Marlene. The Price We Pay for Corporate Hogs. Rep. Institute for Agriculture

and Trade Policy/ Funding Group on Confined Animal Feeding Operations, 27 Feb. 2006. Web. 26 Jan. 2017.

"Last Chance for Animals - Factory Farming." Last Chance for Animals - Factory Farming. Web. 06 May 2016.

Niman, Nicolette Hahn. Righteous Porkchop: Finding a Life and Good Food beyond

Factory Farms. New York, NY: Collins Living, 2009. Print.

“Picture Worth a Thousand Meals: a Meatless Monday Infographic.” Meatless Monday, The Monday Campaigns, Inc., 7 Mar. 2016.

Vaarst, M. Animal Health and Welfare in Organic Agriculture. Wallingford, Oxon, UK:

CABI Pub., 2003. ProQuest Ebrary. Charlotte Mecklenburg Library. Web. 26 Jan. 2017.

Valentine, Jennifer. “Infographic: Veganism and the Environment.” One Green Planet.

N.p., 12 July 2012. Web. 11 May 2016.