Meat is the food that the few consume at the expense of the many. In order to get meat, grain, necessary for human nutrition, is fed to livestock. According to the US Department of Agriculture, more than 90% of all grain produced in America is used to feed livestock and poultry.
Statistics from the United States Department of Agriculture show that to get one kilogram of meat, you need to feed livestock 16 kilograms of grain.
Consider the following figure: 1 acres of soybeans yield 1124 pounds of valuable protein; 1 acres of rice yield 938 pounds. For corn, that figure is 1009. For wheat, 1043. Now consider this: 1 acres of beans: corn, rice, or wheat used to feed a steer that would provide only 125 pounds of protein! This leads us to a disappointing conclusion: paradoxically, hunger on our planet is associated with meat-eating. |
In his book Diet for a Small Planet, Frans Moore Lappe writes: “Imagine you are sitting in a room in front of a plate of steak. Now imagine that 20 people are sitting in the same room, and each of them has an empty plate in front of them. The grain spent on one steak would be quite enough to fill the plates of these 20 people with porridge.
A resident of Europe or America who eats meat on average consumes 5 times more food resources than a resident of India, Colombia or Nigeria. Moreover, Europeans and Americans use not only their products, but also buy grain and peanuts (which are not inferior to meat in protein content) in poor countries – 90% of these products are used to fatten livestock.
Such facts give grounds to assert that the problem of hunger in the world was created artificially. In addition, vegetarian food is much cheaper.
It is not difficult to imagine what a positive effect for the country’s economy will bring the transition to a vegetarian diet of its inhabitants. This will save millions of hryvnia.