My Food Philosophy
Why I am a Vegetarian
I am vegetarian for many different reasons, including environmental, health, and moral. Firstly for environmental reasons: the production and consumption of meat causes deforestation and forest fires, like for example the forest fires that are used to clear space for cattle ranching and to grow industrial animal feed such as soy for farms in other countries. Also, when forests are destroyed to produce meat, billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide are released into the atmosphere which increases the speed of global warming. Also, more than a quarter of the world’s entire land area is used to grow food for animals, which is food that could have been consumed by people anyway. To put this into perspective, 1 kg of Chicken Meat takes around 3.2 kg of Crops to produce.
From a health perspective, consuming meat promotes cancer in many forms. Some studies were done that showed that vegetarians were around 40% less likely to develop cancer in comparison to people that eat meat. The most common forms of cancer were breast, prostate, and colon. Another study done in 2014 by Harvard showed that one serving a day of red meat during adolescence was associated with a 22% higher risk of pre-menopausal breast cancer, and the same meat consumption in adulthood was associated with a 13% higher risk of breast cancer overall. A hypothesis that was offered to explain this is that meat can sometimes contain carcinogenic compounds such as heterocyclic amines (HCA) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), which are formed during the processing or cooking. Meat also contains hormones, which increase your cancer risk.
My last reasoning is from a moral perspective. I believe that animals have rights and deserve to have their best interests taken into consideration, regardless of whether they are of use to humans or not. Modern high-pressure agriculture usually keeps the animals in spaces or cages that are way too overcrowded where they are barely able to move. Often, they are deprived of proper veterinary care, enough exercise, and enough sunlight. Animals are living beings that suffer and die every day by the millions to provide all sorts of meat for humans. More than 25 billion animals die due to the meat industry each year. Also, in a lot of modern factory farms, animals are often injected with hormones and stimulants to make them grow bigger and faster, which I find super cruel and unjust towards the animals. To conclude, my personal view on vegetarianism is not supporting the idea to kill animals solely to satisfy human wants.
