A Meat and Dairy Article from All-Creatures.org
We kill 70 billion land animals and an estimated one trillion sea
animals annually for food. And the only justification for that is
that they taste good. We get pleasure from eating animals and animal
products.
There is no necessity.
Although, in the not-too-distant past, we thought that we needed
animal foods to be healthy, there was never any medical support for
that position and, in any event, no one any longer maintains that it
is necessary to consume animal products to be optimally healthy. The
Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics states that vegan diets “are
healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits
for the prevention and treatment of certain diseases.” The UK
National Health Service says that a sensible vegan diet can be “very
healthy.” Mainstream health care professionals all over the world
are increasingly taking the position that animal products are
detrimental to human health.
We don’t have to settle the debate about whether it is more healthy
to live on a diet of fruits, vegetables, grains, nuts, and seeds
(although the empirical evidence certainly points in that
direction). The point is that a vegan diet is certainly no less
healthy than a diet of decomposing flesh, cow secretions, and
chicken ova. And that’s the only point relevant to the issue of
whether suffering and death are necessary or not.
Moreover, animal agriculture constitutes an ecological disaster. It
is responsible for more greenhouse gases than the burning of fossil
fuel for transportation, and results in deforestation, soil erosion,
and water pollution. The grain fed to animals in the United States
alone could feed 800 million people. Against this background, what
is the best justification we have for inflicting suffering and death
on animals?
The answer is simple: we think they taste good. We derive pleasure
from eating them. Eating animals and animal products is a tradition,
and we have been following it for a very long time.
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