World Vegetarian Day
World Vegetarian Day
You may not know this, but every year on October 1st, World Vegetarian Day is celebrated by exploring a meatless day. That is, if you’re not already full vegetarian or vegan -- then that’s just all the time.
What is Vegetarian?
Vegetarianism is often confused with pescatarian and vegan diets. However, there are several differences. Vegetarians do not consume meat, fish, insects, stock from animals, or gelatin products. Pescatarians are similar to vegetarians, but they eat fish. Vegans, on the other hand, are the most restricted. Vegans do not eat meat, fish, or any animal products such as dairy, eggs, or honey. Check out the chart below for a visual comparison of the three diets.
How does going vegetarian impact the environment?
Generally, eating less meat leads to less soil erosion, deforestation, and water, air, and soil pollution.
70% of America’s crop land is used for animal feed. According to The Way We Eat, takes about 13 lbs of grain to produce 1 lb of beef and 3 lbs of grain to produce 1 lb of chicken. That’s a lot of cropland used to produce meat with little return. Typically these fields are created from destruction of prairieland, forests, and other natural ecosystems. Once cultivated, the land is heavily tilled and sprayed with numerous chemicals. Heavy tilling produces a large amount of particle pollution and CO2 in the atmosphere. Check out the video below from NASA to see a visual of how tilling impacts emissions in the atmosphere.
Tilling also leads to heavy erosion, which pollutes waterways and depletes the health of the soil. Heavy erosion leads to the need for synthetic chemicals to keep up soil health. Synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides even kill good bacteria, insects, and plants that would typically keep soil healthy. This leads to a reliance on chemicals to keep crops alive since the natural support system is killed off. Furthermore, the synthetics leach into aquifers we drink from, get sprayed into the air we breathe, and runoff into nearby bodies of water -- damaging more than just the area the crops are grown on.
Eating a lot of meat increases the demand for this type of farming method which pollutes our Earth in a multitude of ways. By switching to a more plant based diet, the world becomes less reliant on the need for animal feed and can move toward a method of growing crops for human consumption. Crops for human consumption are more heavily regulated than crops grown for animal feed. As a result, switching to a more vegetarian diet will lead to more responsible farming, less destruction of land, and the use of less synthetic chemicals.
What You Can Do
World Vegan Day is November 1st -- try to celebrate by going vegan for the day
I practice Meatless Monday, challenging myself to go meatless at least once a day per week
Eat less meat in general -- do you really need sausage and bacon for breakfast?
