environmental vegetarian

In America, I am a devoted vegetarian. While living in China, I have eaten all sorts of animals and animal parts. “It’s the Chinese way,” I’m told.
Environmental vegetarians understand that a meat-based diet is not environmentally sustainable. Here’s some statistics from an article on John Robbin’s website Earthsave:

By not eating beef you:
* save 3,000 to 5,000 gallons of water for every pound of beef
* avoid the destruction of topsoil and tropical rain forest
* avoid the production of carbon dioxide
    Your average car produces 3 kg/day of CO2.
    Clearing rainforest to produce beef for 1 hamburger produces 75 kg of CO2.
    Eating 1 pound of hamburger does about same damage as driving your car
       for > 3 weeks.

Thinking about sustainable development, we immediately think about China and India because that’s about 1/2 the world’s population. China’s quick to get defensive about the increasing strain placed on global oil and food supplies, but there’s much to be done by a simple change in diet. Again, from the website Earthsave:

Cattle are fed prodigious quantities of corn. At a feedlot of a mere 37,000 cows, 25 tons of corn are dumped every hour. It takes 1.2 gallons of oil to make the fertilizer used for each bushel of that corn. Before a cow is slaughtered, she will eat 25 pounds of corn a day; by the time she is slaughtered she will weigh more than 1,200 pounds. In her lifetime she will have consumed, in effect, 284 gallons of oil.

The stats, facts and figures continue. Collectively they make an intriguing argument that is focused on the well-being of future generations.

I don’t ask people to stop eating meat entirely. Not anymore. Now I typically advocate a small reduction of meat consumption. The reality is that many people wouldn’t think of making such a dramatic diet change for the good of all humanity. It’s beyond them or not important or both. As well, a small reduction makes a big difference, when you consider the total numbers of people who eat meat. Since there are so many meat-eaters, a small change would make a combined big difference.
Your diet choice affects the world. When in China I eat all the dead animals that others buy me, even after I tell them I don’t eat meat. I’ve been told that it is “the Chinese way” of showing generosity. Honestly, I’ve always considered it as the self-serving, wasteful, American-style gluttony it is.