Why Become Vegetarian?: Animal Welfare & Science
In part 1 of this series on vegetarians, we talked about what a vegetarian is and what the difference is between a vegetarian and a vegan is. Now I wanted to talk about the reasons why someone would choose to go vegetarian.
In part 2, we talked about two reasons that vegetarians may choose to be vegetarian: culture and religion, and health.
Part 1: What’s the difference between vegetarian and vegan?
Part 2: Why Become Vegetarian?: Culture/Religion & Health
Part 3: Why Become Vegetarian?: Animal Welfare & Science
There is a lot of study being done these days on vegetarianism and its impacts on the environment, health, and animal welfare. To say that I could cover each area in-depth in a couple of blog posts would be a severe overstatement. Thus, for the purposes of this blog, we’re only going to dip our toes into each category and get a taste for the reasons people go vegetarian. Some of the ideas are still debated among scientists so the best I can do is promise to give the best picture of the current state of scientific knowledge that I can. If you are interested in digging deeper, there are tons of resources available online that I recommend you check out!
Why Become Vegetarian?
There are a lot of good reasons to go vegetarian, so let’s dive in to what they are. Most vegetarians and their reasons for going vegetarian can be split into 4 categories:
- Culture/Religion: Some cultures or religions prohibit eating meat.
- Health: Some studies suggest that removing meat (particularly red meat) from your diet can have big health benefits.
- Animal Welfare: Animals raised for meat and dairy production are generally subjected to what many consider to be cruel treatment.
- Scientific – Impact on climate, sustainability, energy efficiency: Raising livestock is attributed to a large portion of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, meaning it has a big impact on climate, not to mention it’s way more energy efficient to get our energy directly from plants than to have a cow eat it and turn it into meat first.
Convinced to try out being vegetarian? Maybe not. Let’s dive even deeper into two of these categories in…
Part 3: Why Become Vegetarian?: Animal Welfare & Science
Animal Welfare
Animal welfare is probably not a category that requires too much explanation: at present, most of our meat comes from the slaughtering of animals. Even the most humane methods of slaughter serve to simply REDUCE suffering, never eliminating it. Even dairy and other animal products that don’t involve killing an animal still often involve what many consider to be cruel practices: small cages, dangerous living conditions (kept in pens littered with feces, rotting dead animals, and little to no airflow), or painful food extraction methods (harm to udders when milking, killing/maiming bees when extracting honey).
To many vegetarians, animals endure unimaginable suffering on a massive scale just so we can eat something that (arguably) tastes nice and to those people, the taste is not worth the suffering. Vegetarians who have given up meat for the sake of animals have decided that the best way to eliminate those practices is simply to hit the meat producers where it hurts: their wallets. They stop giving meat producers money by not buying it.
The rest is simple economics. For each person that gives up meat, the demand drops by just a little bit, eventually adding up to fewer animals raised for slaughter. So to those who say “but the meat at the market is already dead, if I don’t buy it, someone else will”, many vegetarians reply “we’re not trying to save THAT animal. we’re trying to save a future animal.”
We’ve seen this before with organic foods, low-fat and low-sugar products, and many more: if there is a demand and a market for something, companies will respond and change to support it over time. 20 years ago, organic foods were seen as a “hippie trend.” But despite the fact that there was only a small demand for it initially, companies responded with organic fruits, vegetables, milk, and almost any item you can buy at the supermarket. What we buy matters, and reduction in meat purchases will be met with an eventual reduction in meat production.
Science – Impact on climate, sustainability, energy efficiency
This one is a deep deep category, so I’m going to try to just sum it all up in short and simple broad categories. Let’s talk SCIENCE! <3
Impact on Climate
These days, almost every action you have has a calculated associated carbon footprint: driving a car, cooking food, buying clothes…and producing meat is no exception. In fact, meat production has quite a significant impact on the climate. Not only through carbon, but also methane. Methane is a greenhouse gas that is about 28 times more powerful than carbon dioxide at warming the Earth on a 100-year timescale, and more than 80 times more powerful over 20 years. Unfortunately, raising livestock has a massive methane production rate, with the biggest offender being beef: cows contain microbes in their stomachs that produce a lot of methane in the digestion process and are emitted into the air via burping and farting. Yep. We’re killing the planet with cow burps and farts. These cow (and other grazing animals’) emissions make up about 40% of the human-emitted methane every year, a huge amount that significantly impacts climate change.
What if we just…stopped producing meat?
Since the Industrial Revolution started in 1760, methane concentrations in the atmosphere nearly doubled, with estimates ranging from 14-20 percent of the global warming we’ve seen being attributed to methane.
That means that even if we were somehow to immediately halt all meat production tomorrow (and could somehow magically vanish all the current stock of animals), we would be slowing down global warming by 20%. Not saving us completely from global warming, but definitely hindering the warming by a significant amount and buying ourselves some much needed time to curb carbon emissions!
We may not be able to magically vanish our current livestock, nor would most people want to, but by switching to a vegetarian diet, you certainly help in reducing the effects from that industry on climate change. A study done recently by the French Environment and Energy Management Agency reported that switching to a vegetarian or vegan diet produces 49.6% fewer greenhouse gas emissions and has a 41.5% smaller environmental footprint when compared to diets that included meat.
What about the energy that goes into producing meat?
There are electrical and other associated energy costs with producing meat as well. How much energy do we save by going vegetarian? The French study also estimated that switching to a vegetarian diet requires 26.9% less energy for food production than one that includes meat. Less energy for food production means less greenhouse gas emissions too!
Sustainability
What does sustainable mean?
First of all…What does it mean to be “sustainable?” Being sustainable means that we are doing things that can be continued indefinitely, without ever running out while being able to continually support the worlds growing population. For example, running our cars off of dead dinosaurs (aka fossil fuel/oil)? Not sustainable; We’re gonna run out eventually.
So what does it mean to be sustainable in terms of our food supply? Well, the earth currently sits at a population of about 7.8 billion people (that’s 7,800,000,000 people). It’s a lot of people. But that population is still growing, and the most recent estimates suggest that number will increase to somewhere around 11 billion and either remaining constant or decreasing a bit from there. So we’ve got lots of people, and we’re getting more. Remember that.
Making meat takes money. And water. And energy. And space.
Of all the livestock we raise for meat, in terms of sustainability, cows are the worst, so let’s focus on them. Cows take a LOT of space to raise. And they consume a lot of food and water as well. We also use a large amount of resources to grow and water grains to provide that feed.
As a thought experiment, let’s think of a cow as a beef-making machine. Estimates suggest that if we put 6.6 lbs of grain and 1,800 gallons of water into our beef-machine (aka ‘cow’), our beef-machine makes 1lb of beef. We also know that globally, we consume about 130,000,000,000 (that’s 130 billion) pounds of beef per year.
Doing the math, we have to provide 858 billion pounds of grain (which also takes water to grow), and…Well. A lot of water to produce. You can do the math, or just look at this…
Or you can just look at this live counter that tells us how much water has been used in meat production this year alone.
So it’s a lot of water and a lot of grain. But remember how our population is increasing? And so is meat consumption? That means that if we don’t change anything, we’re actually going to run out of water at some point in about 19 years. Which…Yes, there’s a live counter for that too on this website.
I love this website. It has live running counters for everything relating population to climate and the environment. You can even see how much meat has been eaten this year:
We eat a lot of meat.
Meat takes too much of all the things.
In short, as many of the lower-income countries start to afford meat (I’m lookin’ at you, India and China), meat consumption will rise with the population. And with the number of resources required to produce meat, we just don’t have enough to support meat for everyone. Hence, meat is not sustainable.
Energy Efficiency
Energy efficiency: a measure of how much energy you get out of a process compared to how much energy you lost.
Well, that’s vague and difficult to understand, so let’s look at a quick example. Let’s say you turn on the heater in your room. You’re putting electricity (energy) into your heater, which is heating up the air in your room, which in turn is heating up you. But now let’s imagine you have thin walls. Now, as your room heats up, some of that heat is heating the walls which in turn is heating the air outside, rather than you and your room: you have energy losses. You’re losing some of that energy you put into your heater to outside air. That is all energy that is NOT going to get transferred to you. Every process out there has some losses. This is why if you have one of those nifty external batteries for your phone, you’re actually going to be paying more money to charge your phone because you’re adding another place for energy losses: chemical losses within the battery and adding another cable or two to the process that will lose some energy as it heats up.
The same concept applies to the food we eat! All of the food we eat is made using energy from the sun. Plants get their energy from the sun, and are pretty good at taking that energy and turning it into plant material, but still suffer some energy losses (the plants don’t absorb the entire spectrum of light that the sun gives off, losing a lot of energy here). We then feed those plants to cows, which take the energy from those plants and turn it into meat, again suffering more energy losses (they’re also making bone, using energy to move around, etc). So we’re losing a lot of energy here that we don’t necessarily need to from the “cow middle-man.” In terms of energy efficiency, it’s WAY more efficient for us to just eat the plants directly! I’ll let Mark Rober and Bill Gates explain it:
Honestly, his video had such a huge impact on me and was so effective, that I think you should just go and watch the whole video. It’s great.
As engineers, we (me and Mark Rober) care a LOT about energy efficiency. No really, we REALLY like energy efficiency. And as an engineer, the amount of energy that is lost by eating meat makes me a smidge cringey. So when we choose to skip meat and eat vegetarian, we save a lot of energy.
Don’t Try Going Vegetarian Without Proper Knowledge
As general good advice, you should take any major switch in diets gradually. Trying to go from meat-eater to 100% full vegan is a biiiiig jump to make, and could potentially be dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing. To start transitioning to a vegetarian lifestyle, you could try some of the following:
- Dedicate 1-3 days a week to being vegetarian (Heard of ‘Meatless Monday’?)
- Be vegetarian just for one meal a day
- Be a meat-eater for just one meal a day
At the very least, make sure you read a reputable article (or three) on proper vegetarian nutrition, like this one, which will introduce you to some of the basic vitamins you need to keep track of and has links to other great posts on starting out vegetarian. If you are REALLY serious about going vegetarian, consult a nutritionist or doctor!
Please keep in mind that if you plan on switching to or trying out a vegetarian diet, be sure that you do the research. Removing animal products from your diet removes certain sources of vitamins and minerals that you MAY not be getting from the fruits and vegetables you currently eat and you may need to supplement your new vegetarian diet with foods you have never tried before. If you don’t feel comfortable, consult a nutritionist for proper vegetarian nutritional guidelines.
Full disclosure: I am NOT vegetarian. Yet.
I made this blog because I’m still a work in process. I want to live life according to my own values and for me, that means being kinder to animals and stopping climate change at all costs. That means changing my life to be more environmentally-friendly. It’s not easy. It takes work and challenging myself. I’m having to do the research and the study to learn about why being vegetarian helps me achieve my own goals. I think that to live vegetarian is more in line with my own personal values and that is something we should aim to do every day.
Sources:
–https://www.huffpost.com/entry/vegan-vegetarian-climate-change-diets_n_5d7fa569e4b03b5fc8873dc7
–https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warming/methane/
–https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/78/3/660S/4690010
–https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/consumption/foods-and-beverages/world-consumption-of-meat
–https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnut.2018.00008/full
–https://beef2live.com/story-world-beef-consumption-per-capita-ranking-countries-0-111634