18/09/2021
Societies that exploit animals for food are the main cause of world hunger because they feed a disproportionate percentage of the world's crops to 70 billion land animals annually killed by the meat, dairy and egg industries worldwide and tens of billions of marine animals (yes, we have fish farms nowadays)—instead of 7.5 billion people on the planet!
Do the math. You don't have to be Einstein to figure out this equation. Every two to three seconds some human (most likely a child) starves to death, while pigs and cows continually get fat. Even the Council for Agriculture, Science and Technology, a group comprised of people involved in animal agriculture, acknowledges that 10 billion people could be fed with the available crop land in America if everyone became vegan. One acre of land can yield 30,000 pounds of carrots, 40,000 pounds of potatoes or 50,000 pounds of tomatoes. However, one acre of land can yield only 250 pounds of meat. Why? Depending on the animal in question, it takes from three to twenty pounds of vegetable protein to create one pound of animal protein. Thus it has been said in many places that animal agriculture works like “a protein factory in reverse.” However, not only does this process squander protein resources; it obliterates carbohydrates and fiber, antioxidants, phytochemicals, and many other nutrients altogether.
Jeremy Rifkin, a widely respected author on issues of worldwide food supply, traces the occurrences of famine directly to our increasing tendency to use precious food resources as animal feed. In his editorial piece There's a Bone to Pick with Meat Eaters, published in the Los Angeles Times in May 2002, Rifkin states that 36 percent of all the world's grains are fed to food animals; in the U.S. the number is a staggering 70 percent. (Many estimates have the worldwide number as high as 65 percent. Either estimate is obscene, and proves that eating animal-based foods is the worst form of human and animal abuse.)