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Giving up bacon and cheese sounds like a nightmare. But if you want to leave the world a better place, changing your diet can be the answer.
Here’s how replacing your 2% milk with almond milk and your bacon for vegan bacon can help you become more sustainable.
It takes roughly 2,400 gallons of water to produce just a single pound of beef from beginning to end. Livestock drink more freshwater than other creatures and they often pollute water, which makes for a lot of waste. We are producing cows at an unnatural rate by artificial insemination. We are creating more cows each year only to be slaughtered and the process repeated. By going vegan, you would be helping in the decline of this cycle.
Waste water containing manure severely harms river and stream ecosystems. Factory farms do not have sewage treatment systems like we have in our cities and towns. So, this concentrated slop ends up polluting our water and destroying the land. Pollution can also be caused by the antibiotics and hormones entering the water. Once they enter the water they harm aquatic and human life.
In addition to consuming large amounts of water, cattle also contribute more CO2 into the atmosphere than all forms of transportation or man-made contributors. According to a report from the Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN, the worldwide production of livestock produces 18% of humans’ greenhouse gas. That’s more than any form of transportation. Plants however help clean the air.
Livestock weaken and erode soil. Mass deforestation is often a result of our need for more livestock and meat. Every minute we bulldoze seven football fields of land in order to make more room for farmed animals. Raising them uses 30% of the planet’s land mass. The trees we clear in the process no longer provide nutrients for the soil. Growing diverse plants would nourish the soil and offer it long-term resilience.
There are approximately 7.6 billion people on this planet and the population continues to grow. As it grows our requirement for food will increase as well. By choosing a vegan diet instead of one loaded with animal products, people can dramatically reduce the amount of land, water and oil resources they consume and the amount of pollution they would otherwise cause. Reducing one’s ecological footprint also means causing less harm to the Earth’s non-human inhabitants.
By switching to a vegan diet, each person can save roughly 190 animals each year from the horrific cruelty of the meat and dairy industry.
