To Veg Or Not To Veg, That Is The Question

Lately I’ve been getting lots of email newsletters talking about how being a vegetarian is better for the environment. But nothing about why it was bad for the environment. So, as I so often do, I took to Google to find out why.

I found this great article by two high school (yes high school) students that explained it really well.

It takes 10 pounds of plant food to make 1 pound of meat. So the 1 pound of hamburger that you used to make tacos for 1 night could have been 10 pounds of plants/grains for up to 10 meals. I knew that cows obviously ate a lot but it’s another thing to put it into numbers like that.

Those cows are on the other side of our back fence.


In the U.S. 70% of the grains we grow and 50% of the water used goes to livestock.

It takes 8x the amount of fossil fuel to produce animal protein as it does to produce the same amount of plant protein. That breaks down to 4 hundred gallons of fossil fuel to per person per year.

Two to four times more farmland is needed for a meat eating diet then a vegetarian diet. That’s a huge amount of trees, plants and natural wildlife that are cut down and displaced.

And the poop, oh lordy, don’t even get me started on the problems the poop cause.

I highly recommend reading the whole article and then checking out this one afterwards.

Now I was a vegetarian in Jr. high and high school for no other real reason then because my best friend was. When she moved away I slowly gave it up and haven’t given it much consideration since.


Jaymie & me the summer before sophomore year of high school. Yes, grunge was in.


It’s easy to give something up when it didn’t really mean anything in the first place, but now knowing what I do about the environmental impact of eating meat I may have to reconsider.

However I may be the only one, I mean could you tell these faces they can’t have hotdogs anymore?