The corn and wheat fed to RUMINANTS (who have four stomachs FOR A REASON) is generally not fit for human consumption. Furthermore, cattle GRAZE on land where the topography, climate, and soil, any or all three, make that land unsuitable for crop farming. Supplemented (or not) with feed grain, the cattle can graze, produce meat, dairy products, leather, medicines, industrial glues, and heaven knows what else -- every smidgen of a beef or dairy animal is used for something -- on the same land where all the birds and snakes and foxes and lizards and everything else live pretty much as they were. CROPLAND necessarily entails destroying the habitat of all those critters, AND ON TOP OF THAT generally entails diverting water from other ecosystems to irrigate said crops.
Livestock agriculture is THE MOST EFFICIENT use of natural resources and produces FAR AND AWAY more useful products. I love farming and come from a long, long line of farmers, but also come from a long line of cattle ranchers.
You want to be vegan, fine. You want to subject children to it, that's child abuse. You want to rationalize it as "better for the environment," go ahead and kid yourself, but when you emotionalize it with such false claptrap and cause young girls to adopt a vegan diet because they think its "being nice to animals," YOU bear the responsiblity for all the health problems, including osteoporosis, that those girls will get later. Listen, I've been around vegans and their kids. I'VE SEEN ALL THIS and all the allergy problems and emotional problems those kids have -- taking pills is THE WRONG WAY and THE DUMB WAY to live healthily. And I've seen their parents, adults, continue to insist that two plus two equals five because it should!
I can respect vegetarianism. Veganism is foolish dangerous vanity to the utmost.
Ping to my post 36. Thanks for talking sense. And I hope people remember that the environmental movement isn't just about energy production and consumption, it's about FOOD production and consumption.
Green is the new Red.
I don't support promoting food choices to children. This is a better position today than a decade or so ago, since information about food choices is now available to children through the Internet. That is how I informed myself and any curious mind can do the same. Further, my vegan diet is a health choice, not an ethical one. By removing cholesterol and sodium from my diet, my vegan diet rectified my high LDL cholesterol and hypertension, avoiding lifelong medication and putting me in a lower risk group for insurance purposes. I understand that this only works in about a third of cases, so I am one of the lucky ones.
I need to be careful about making statements about meat production being wasteful, however. As a third generation city-dweller, I read statements like that on vegetarian websites and don't have the background to critically filter their arguments. Thank you Finny and SampleMan for enlightening me, and others.