When I was a kid—I don’t know how young, but my dad was still alive so I must have been younger than six—I went apple picking with my family and I picked a withered brown apple up off the ground and a worm slithered out. I understood that sometimes worms inhabited apples, but to witness a concept I’d only previously seen in cartoons come to life shocked and horrified me. I don’t remember for sure but I assume I chucked that damn apple far away.
My favorite food in those days was peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Far from a master of spoken English, I called them jetty rang-itches. My mom tells a story that once she came home and found me in my high chair, frustrated and crying. My dad, exasperated, was tearing apart the kitchen, pulling every food item from the fridge and cabinets and offering them to me: This? This? This?
No, I kept telling him. Jetty rang-itch!
I don’t know what the hell he wants, my dad said. But my mom knew.
*
Animal agriculture, namely the farming of cattle, is the world’s number one cause of ocean dead zones and Amazon rainforest deforestation, and contributes more carbon dioxide emissions to the environment than the entire transportation sector[1].
In the battle to curb climate change, the United States, and most of the planet, is focusing its efforts on fossil fuel-burning vehicles, meanwhile the effect that animal agriculture has on the environment is woefully underreported. Depending on which sources you consider, from the time a calf is born, raised, slaughtered, processed, and dropped off at your table, one quarter pound cheeseburger requires 460-660 gallons of water to produce, and 65 square feet of land[2]. This is while 783,000,000 people worldwide don’t have access to clean drinking water[3].
56,000,000,000 animals are raised (meaning fed and watered) for slaughter each year[4], and yet we can’t feed and water the whole human population? Please. If we could get past our American programming and sense of entitlement and just eat the grains (along with fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds and the other components of a balanced diet) we feed to livestock, our country could feed 800,000,000 people a year, or more than twice the United States population[5]. If the rest of the planet did the same, we could end world hunger tomorrow. The truth is, we just don’t want to.
And then we could talk about how cows are social creatures with unique personalities, and even best friends[6]. No living creature deserves the pain and cruelty of a life spent being raised to be eaten.
*
Authorities like doctors T. Colin Campbell[7] and Joel Fuhrman[8] can explain better than myself how humans can get all the protein we need from plants. Research shows that a plant-based diet is the only diet that can reverse diabetes and heart disease[9] and provide a much healthier lifestyle (personally and planetary) than the one with which we’re currently destroying the earth.
All along that worm was right. I wish I could live in an apple. I’ve been a vegan for over two years now. I’ve never felt this good, and it makes sense. An animal that lives its entire life in misery and confinement (there are plenty of videos on the Internet showing the condition of factory farms/ slaughterhouses, if you want to see for yourself), sleeping and rooting in its own shit, only to be brutally murdered, is going to be filled with the stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol. Our modern lives with our jam-packed schedules leave us teeming with our own stress hormones—do we really want to consume someone else’s?
For the people who claim you need to eat animal products in order to be healthy and strong, I’ll refer you to this passage from Walden by Henry David Thoreau: “One farmer says to me, ‘You cannot live on vegetable food alone, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with;’ and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while as he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plough along in spite of every obstacle.” It’s true that the biggest, strongest animals on the planet (horses, bulls, oxen, rhinos, gorillas, elephants, etc.) are vegan. And I would also point you to the examples of athletes like Scott Jurek, regarded as perhaps the greatest ultramarathon runner of all time, also a vegan, and Rich Roll, champion ultra-triathlete and a well-known author and vegan podcaster. And then there’s Matt Frazier, author of the book No Meat Athlete, and if you want to have your mind blown, Google Nimai Delgado.
Personally I find that I wake up less sluggish than I used to in my carnivorous days, I have a clearer mental focus (most of the time—DON’T TAKE THE BLUE ACID), and simply the idea of going for a five mile jog or dropping to the living room floor for some push-ups is less excruciating than it was even when I was in the Army and being paid to do so.
And one of my favorite foods is still a jetty rang-itch.
[1]https://gelr.org/2015/10/23/a-leading-cause-of-everything-one-industry-that-is-destroying-our-planet-and-our-ability-to-thrive-on-it-georgetown-environmental-law-review/
[2]http://www.businessinsider.com/one-hamburger-environment-resources-2015-2
[3]https://thewaterproject.org/water-scarcity/water_stats
[4]http://www.worldwatch.org/node/5443
[5]http://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-million-people-grain-livestock-eat
[6]https://www.barnsanctuary.org/blog/science-cow-friendship-cows-best-friends/
[7]http://nutritionstudies.org
[8]https://www.drfuhrman.com
[9]https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/plant-based-diets/