We farm in SWMO and run beef cattle on four farms, not one drop of water comes from a well or anywhere else that could deplete anything. All we use and same for most others here is ponds and streams and the last four months we have seen tremendous flooding, maybe they should drink more.

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I haven't crunched the numbers that closely, but after having worked with a small organic grower the past couple of seasons, and watched him raise a herd of about twenty Scottish Highland cows, I think it would be hard to contest the greater environmental impact on raising animals for meat. He's able to get old bread for the cows free from a local bakery, but he has to have a truck load of hay shipped in twice a year, the last time from Canada(Central Massachusetts here) because of the structural economics influencing currency exchange. There are no ponds nearby, so he has to fill big rubbermaid tanks. He certainly doesn't have this much environmental cost raising three acres of mixed vegetables for thirty shareholders who are part of a community supported farm.
Francis Moore Lappe, author of "Diet For A Small Planet," has a piece in the July issue of the "Progressive," where she cites a 2007 University of Michigan study that concluded that moving globally to sustainable, organic farming could increase food output by about 57 percent. As I seem to hear incessantly of the shortage in the grain supply globally, I feel feeding less grain to cows being raised for meat is an obvious way to reduce the environmental impact and tax the food system less.

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The next time you see a Vegetarian eating fruit transported to the US 6 months out of season by JET, ask them how sustainable their lifestyle is. I couldn't give a rip if you are a meat eater or not- it's none of my business.

Like has been posted above, not all farmers use the wasteful methods described and those not farming in essentially what is a desert (most of the southwest), don't use anywhere near that much water as it is supplied without subsidy by nature. You see, in Arizona, cotton is grown in the desert with federally subsidized water sold below cost. In Mississippi, the same cotton grows with what nature provides. Same with an Apple grown in Washington State vs Michigan. All farming is not the equally water or energy intensive.

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I would love to quote the "it takes about 1,916 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef" bit, but I'd like some reference. Where does the number come from? I clicked the link to the Graham article but I didn't see numbers in that.

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The broad brush strokes of this article make the point and hold beef up as the evil culprit. As a farmer my families cow herd has saved our "bacon" many years. When other crop prices are depressed, the cattle come through and help make the payments.
One of the reasons is the cows produce income (calves) without much money invested at all. It's really an amazing thing to feed my family and pay my bills with good husbandry.
There are real problems with the industrial model of agriculture being practiced in this country. And perhaps this article does more harm than good by pointing out how harmful industrial animal production is.
It seems to me this could have been written without lumping all of us who don't farm in that fashion together.
Thank you for the opportunity to express my thoughts

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i'm vegan. while eating dead animals horrifies me, the knowledge that most of my fruit is flown 5000 or 10000 miles in a toxic gas guzzling airplane also fills me with sorrow and fear.

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Water doesn't go away. You get it back. Next time you take third grade science, LISTEN!!!

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I've been vegetarian since 1982. I attended my first anti-vivisection protest in the spring of 1985 at UC San Diego, when anti-apartheid demonstrations were taking place. I first got interested in promoting vegetarianism in mainstream society after reading John Robbins' Diet for a New America (1987). Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, it makes veganism seem as reasonable and mainstream as recycling.

Half the water consumed in the U.S. goes to irrigate land growing feed and fodder for livestock. Huge amounts of water wash away their excrement. U.S. livestock produce 20 times as much excrement as does the entire human population; creating sewage which is 10 to several hundred times more concentrated than raw domestic sewage. Animal wastes cause 10 times more water pollution than does the U.S. human population; the meat industry causes 3 times as much harmful organic water pollution than the rest of the nation's industries combined. Meat producers are the number one industrial polluters in our nation, contributing to half the water pollution in the United States.

Joanna Macy, author of Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age, depicts the advantages of America moving towards a vegan diet in her foreword to Diet for a New America:

"The effects on our physical health are immediate. The incidence of cancer and heart attack, the nation's biggest killers, drops precipitously. So do many other diseases now demonstrably and causally linked to consumption of animal proteins and fats, such as osteoporosis...

"The social, ecological, and economic consequences, as we Americans turn away from animal food products, are equally remarkable. We find that the grain we previously fed to fatten livestock can now feed five times the U.S. population; so we have become able to alleviate malnutrition and hunger on a worldwide scale...

"The great forests of the world, that we had been decimating for grazing purposes, begin to grow again. Oxygen-producing trees are no longer sacrificed for cholesterol-producing steaks.

"The water crisis eases. As we stop raising and grinding up cattle for hamburgers, we discover that ranching and farm factories had been the major drain on our water resources. The amount now available for irrigation and hydroelectric power doubles. Meanwhile, the change in diet frees over 90% of the fossil fuel previously used to produce food. With this liberation of water energy and fossil fuel energy, our reliance on oil imports declines, as does the rationale for building nuclear power plants..."

Joanna Macy admits, "This scenario is wildly, absurdly utopian. It is also clearly the way we are meant to live, built to live." What could possibly make it a reality? "It is this very book!"

Paul McCartney also says, "If anyone wants to save the planet, all they have to do is just stop eating meat. That's the single most important thing you could do. It's staggering when you think about it. Vegetarianism takes care of so many things in one shot: ecology, famine, cruelty. Let's do it! Going veggie is the single best idea for the new century."

Roberta Kalechofsky of Jews for Animal Rights similarly says:

"Merely by ceasing to eat meat
Merely by practicing restraint
We have the power to end a painful industry

"We do not have to bear arms to end this evil
We do not have to contribute money
We do not have to sit in jail or go to
meetings or demonstrations or
engage in acts of civil disobedience

"Most often, the act of repairing the world,
of healing mortal wounds,
is left to heroes and tzaddikim (holy people)
Saints and people of unusual discipline

"But here is an action every mortal can
perform--surely it is not too difficult!"

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As someone with a social science background, it is very obvious that whoever keeps running these articles in Alternet is clueless on how to motivate people. There have been so many of them, people sense an agenda and have stop trusted them. Vegetarians are coming off as religious recruiters who will not stop until everyone sees their light. With the price of food soaring, there is a much better way to go about it. I am not going to share it because too many previous articles have irritated me to the point of no return. Although the above was reasonable. P.S. The Trib just did a feature on Ariana Huffington's expensive home. You know, she might want to examine her own footprints before her magazine points fingers.

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Go out on the trail for 10 days (if you've never done it before, if you have, you already know what I'm sayin'). Add home food gardening in containers to backpacking... that helps too. A body will learn more about water, waste and water footprints on the trail and doing container gardening for food than the linked site can ever hope to teach 'em.

A human being can live on very little water, drinking, cooking, cleaning and sourcing for food grown and consumed. The Amerikaaner lifestyle and "norms" are the problem. The big beef industry is symptomatic of that.

As a backpacker and a home grower, I am continually shocked at the level of casual water-waste typical of others. To a person, I have witnessed water-wise conversions from those who have engaged in backpacking and home-growing.

As for the rhetorical question raised by the author, I can safely say that yes, a good steak, locally and humanely raised and slaughtered is so fine on my BBQ. And yes, it's an increasingly rare experience given rising fuel and food costs, and the fact that that locally raised and butchered meat costs twice that of big biz' beef (aka disease ridden filth for cheap). If you're worried about meat, go hunting. You'll learn more taking a life to sustain your own than you will by blindly being vegetarian or vegan as a political act. Look your kill in the eyes as you send them on to the spirit world and take their body to sustain your own. If you haven't done that at least once, you don't have an inch of understanding about meat.

Although the more veggies and vegans there are in the world, the more meat I might be able to take... thanks, my veggie-diligent brothers & sisters, you make it possible for me to have my fish three times a week and my meat once a month. Impact is impact, everything must go somewhere, everything has a cost, there is no free lunch, everything is always changing, everything has limits. Ecology, people... not websites will change the world. It's already too late and Earth gonna do her weedin' out real soon.

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I'm a meat-atarian, so I'm probably the wrong person to ask "is the cost appropriate?" For a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fallacy of the author's unspoken argument, "if we quit using so much water in Idaho we'll have more for Texas," I believe the cost appropriate. There's plenty of water in our world. The problem is cost and transport.

I'd suggest, if we want to "green" the world we concentrate on things that aren't related to food. Yes, I could switch to lettuce and beans, but I prefer beef. Sorry, I ain't switching because the poor cow suffers (it's a cow for crying out loud), or uses a lot of water. When beef gets to be $86 a pound I'll look at legumes and perhaps switch, but, more than likely, I'll just take another job, or turn to a life of crime to support my addiction. Good thing is I'll probably die of rectal cancer a lot faster than the folks munching on broccoli, so there's a silver lining.

But enough of that; here are my suggestions for "greening" our world.

First, let's eliminate everything related to convenience and the internal combustion engine. I drive a mile-and-a-half to work. I should walk. Others drive longer distances, but there's public transportation or car pooling. There should be a law requiring all of us to only use a fossil fuel fed engine in life and death situations, and if we're over say 75, we don't use one even then.

Second, I'm fortunate I don't watch much television because that's a luxury that is certainly a major pollutant of both our planet and our minds. Get rid of this junk.

Third, yards and gardens need to be eliminated.

Fourth, pets should go as well (and I'd advocate we look real, real hard at children as well, or since China is the stellar example used by the author [have you ever been to China--they should use a lot more water], copy China's restricitions on size of families).

Fifth, I see limited need for electricity during the day and absolutely no need for air conditioning.

Sixth, anyone who is living in a place where it's too hot, or too dry should move. Growing massive cities in the desert is the height of folly.

Let's take care of some this low hanging fruit like the preceding, see where we are in a century or two and then we can go to work on those of us who choose to pick up a rib rather than an orange.

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Simple. Yes. Last time I looked Lake Michigan was pretty full.

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The 2000 gallons of water doesn't vanish.

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Some previous posters have made good points, while others are just out to lunch (pun serendipitous). Every life, no matter the form it takes, exists at the expense of other lives. But that fundamental fact of science does not justify the mindless dog-eat-dog consumerism which American culture has come to epitomize.

We can quibble over whether a steak uses 1900 gallons of water to make, or "merely" half that. But there is no denying that it's a lot. Water usage is insidious and largely invisible. Example: two summers ago, after I'd been in my new house for several months, I watered my lawn on a few days (probably three), and my metered water usage for that month shot up from around 1100 gallons to 8000. Now the flat fee I'm required to pay the township allows each homeowner to use up to 10,000 gallons/month before paying extra, so watering the grass didn't "cost" me more...at least not in dollars. But I didn't do it again because I'd just been shown dramatically how quickly water gets used up. I left the poor grass to fend for itself. Which also created regret.

Why? Because plants are dynamic living beings just the same as animals. That has been my firm belief since childhood and in the past decade or more science has begun to document that fact. Killing them, whether by denying water or chopping them down for food, is still killing. Botanical murder. For a glimpse into the science of plant communication -- not merely by chemical changes, but also via immediate sound waves -- go to http://www.science-frontiers.com/sf063/sf063b11.htm and www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/311/5762/812). From the Science Mag site you can further search more than 300 other references using "science of trees talking".

Before you fire off a disrespectful or even vicious missive, let me reiterate: Every life, no matter the form it takes, exists at the expense of other lives. Unavoidably so. I will, therefore, continue to kill some of my fellow beings -- plant and/or animal -- in order to stay alive.

But I will do so mindful that my food sources have sustained my life with their own. And not voluntarily, but by an aggressive act against them by me (directly or indirectly). And mindful that the production of some kinds of food take much more from the earth than others, nearly always in resources which are sorely needed by other human beings. Not to mention other animals and plants.

It is likely that in prehistory humans were a desired food source for one or more species of larger animals. It behooves us, therefore, to approach the getting of food with humility, not arrogance. And to do so carefully, humanely, as kindly as we can possibly manage. Without greed. Without waste.

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Half the water consumed in the U. S. goes to irrigate land growing feed and fodder for livestock. Huge amounts of water are also used to wash away their excrement. U.S. livestock produce 20 times as much excrement as does the entire human population, creating sewage which is 10 to several hundred times more concentrated than raw domestic sewage. Animal wastes cause ten times more water pollution than does the U.S. human population; the meat industry causes 3 times as much harmful organic water pollution than the rest of the nation's industries combined.

Meat producers, the number one industrial polluters in our nation, contribute to half the water pollution in the United States. The water that goes into a 1,000 pound steer could float a destroyer. It takes 25 gallons of water to produce a pound of wheat, but 2,500 gallons to produce a pound of meat. If these costs weren't subsidized by the American taxpayers, hamburger meat would be $35 per pound!

The burden of subsidizing the California meat industry costs taxpayers $24 billion annually. Livestock producers are California's biggest consumers of water. Every tax dollar the state doles out to livestock producers costs taxpayers over 7 dollars in lost wages, higher living costs and reduced business income. 17 western states have enough water supplies to support economies and populations twice as large as the present.

Overgrazing of cattle leads to topsoil erosion, turning once-arable land into desert. We lose 4 million acres of topsoil each year and 85 percent of this loss is directly caused by raising livestock. To replace the soil we've lost, we're destroying our forests. Since 1967, the rate of deforestation in the U. S. has been 1 acre every 5 seconds. For each acre cleared in urbanization, seven are cleared for grazing or growing livestock feed.

One-third of all raw materials in the U. S. are consumed by the livestock industry and it takes 3 times as much fossil fuel energy to produce meat than it does to produce plant foods. A report on the energy crisis in Scientific American warned: "The trends in meat consumption and energy consumption are on a collision course."

Nor can fish provide any help here. There are signs that the fishing industry (which is quite energy-intensive) has already overfished the oceans in several areas. And fish could never play a major role in the worlds diet anyway: the entire global fish catch of the world, if divided among all the world's inhabitants would amount to only a few ounces of fish per person per week.

The American Dietetic Association reports that throughout history, the human race has lived on "vegetarian or near vegetarian diets," and meat has traditionally been a luxury. Studies show the healthiest human populations on the globe live almost entirely on plant foods--useful data, given our skyrocketing healthcare costs. Nathan Pritikin, author of The Pritikin Plan, recommended not more than 3 ounces of animal protein per day; 3 ounces per week for his patients who had already suffered a heart attack.

If the world population triples in the next 100 years, and meat consumption continues, then meat production would have to triple as well. Instead of 3.7 billion acres of cropland and 7.5 billion acres of grazing land, we would require 11.1 billion acres of cropland and 22.5 billion acres of grazing land.

But this is slightly larger than the total land area of the six inhabited continents! We are desperately short of forests, water and energy already. Even if we resort to extreme methods of population control: abortion, infanticide, genocide, etc...modest increases in the world population would make it impossible to maintain current levels of meat consumption. On a vegetarian diet, however, the world could easily support a population several times its present size.

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Grass-fed (not grain-fed) cattle, whose excrement is treated as the golden substance it is -- composted and used to enrich soil, or managed for carbon sequestration, as described in this Ode magazine piece -- is a friend to survival. The grotesque excesses of factory farming, and the denatured, demeaning way our culture eats its products are the problem.

Take a look at the Ode article -- it's an eye-opener. Really brought home to me how we have abused and distorted an agricultural ecosystem that supported all life in a sustainable way. And I'm a 30-year vegetarian!

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You could just not have children and that would save enough water that you could justify eating a pound of beef almost everyday if you wanted to.

Burgers or babies..hmmm. Decisions, decisions.

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"Global hunger could be directly attributed to meat-eating." ---Chrissie Hynde

Half the world's population does not receive an adequate amount of food to eat. Ten to twenty million die annually of hunger and its effects. The Institute for Food and Development Policy reports that, "Forty thousand children starve to death on this planet every day," or one child every two seconds.

The livestock population of the United States today consumes enough grain and soybeans to feed over five times the entire human population of the country. We feed these animals over 80% of the corn we grow, and over 95% of the oats. Less than half the harvested agricultural acreage in the United States is used to grow food for people. Most of it is used to grow livestock feed.

Ronald J. Sider of Evangelicals for Social Action, in his 1977 book, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, pointed out that 220 million Americans were eating enough food (largely because of the high consumption of grain-fed livestock) to feed over one billion people in the poorer countries.

The world's cattle alone, not to mention pigs and chickens, consume a quantity of food equal to the caloric needs of 8.7 billion people. It takes 16 pounds of grain to produce one pound of beef. According to Department of Agriculture statistics, one acre of land can grow 20,000 pounds of potatoes. That same acre of land, if used to grow cattlefeed, can produce less than 165 pounds of beef.

In his book, The Hungry Planet, Georg Bergstrom points out that protein-starved underdeveloped nations export more protein to wealthy nations than they receive. He calls this "the protein swindle." Ninety percent of the world's fish meal catch, for example, is exported to rich countries. One-third of Africa's peanut crop winds up in the stomachs of European livestock. Half the world's cereal crop is fed to livestock and the United States annually imports one million tons of vegetable protein from Third World nations--just to feed its farm animals.

Bergstrom writes: "Sometimes one wonders how many Americans and Western Europeans have grasped the fact that quite a few of their beef steaks, quarts of milk, dozens of eggs, and hundreds of broilers are the result, not of their agriculture, but of the approximately two million metric tons of protein, mostly of high quality, which astute Western businessmen channel away from the needy and hungry."

Jeremy Rifkin, author of a dozen influential books and President of the Foundation on Economic Trends, writes in his 1992 bestseller Beyond Beef:

"Cattle and other livestock are devouring much of the grain produced on the planet. It need be emphasized that this is a new phenomenon, unlike anything ever experienced before.

"Contrary to popular belief, the poor are getting poorer each year...Increased poverty has meant increased malnutrition. On the African continent, nearly one in every four human beings is malnourished. In Latin America, nearly one out of every seven people goes to bed hungry each night. In Asia and the Pacific, 28 percent of the people border on starvation, experiencing the gnawing pain of a perpetual hunger."

"In the Near East, one in ten people is underfed. Chronic hunger now affects upwards of 1.3 billion people, according to the world Health Organization--a statistic all the more striking in a world where one third of all the grain produced is being fed to cattle and other livestock. Never before in human history has such a large percentage of our species--nearly 25 percent--been malnourished.

"The transition of world agriculture from food grain to feed grains represents an...evil whose consequences may be far greater and longer lasting than any past examples of violence inflicted by men against their fellow human beings."

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The reason so much grain goes from poor counries to rich countries isn't because they are feeding it to livestock, it is because they (we) can afford to feed it to livestock.

There is no money in feeding poor people. If there was, food would be an inalienable right, which BTW, I think it should be. But, I don't think that countries should be obligated to feed other countries.

All poverty, included lack of food, is directly attributable to two factors, both economic. One is direct (physical) access to resources whether it be land, water, minerals, or any other physical thing needed to make goods. The other is access to economic opportunity. This is denied to many people in many ways from lack of access to education and basic healthcare, media (information), debt based policies that keep people indebted, empirial wars for resources, and even sexism by subjugating women to mere baby factories.

If tomorrow we entirely stopped feeding livestock grain do you think it would then go to feed the masses? Probably not. First, it would cause prices to plummet which would help the undernourished afford food but then would hurt the producers by causing an eventual crash in prices due to oversupply. The cheap food, more then likely, would cause a population explosion in the poorest countries.

Food producers to combat low prices would grow more which would cause an increase in soil erosion due to overfarming which eventually would lead to a population crash because of an eventual drop in food production due to decreased soil productivity.

Many food exporting countries are also the same countries that experience some of the worst food shortages save for countries (mostly in Africa) who suffer from hunger because of poor harvests due to climate. Explain that. That is why many of those same countries are now limiting exports of food to help keep food affordable for their own citizens. Expect much more of these policies to continue in the future as we outgrow our food supply.

There are two mechanisms for these boom and buste. One is societal, and it is debt. The other is biological and is just natural population flucuations which can be over a hundred fold given a large enough time frame.

Your assertion that livestock are to blame is wrong as is humans eating meat is causing starvation is wrong. If we didn't feed grain to livestock we would find another "higher"-i.e. profitable- use and feeding poor people would not be it. More would probably go to biofuels which then we'd be in the conundrum of hmm, do I drive to work and know that doing so deprives someone somewhere of breakfast, llunch and dinner for the year?

Ultimately, the only sane option is for communities to develop food systems that are not dependent upon external inputs for fertility maintenance, food processing/preservation, and transportation. We also need economic policies that do not deprive people access to resources or economic opportunity.

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Significant environmental damage results from livestock agriculture, often driving many other species into extinction. The existence of dodo birds was first recorded in the early 1500s by Portuguese Sailors. The dodo, which weighed about 50 pounds, was incapable of defending itself and could not flee from its enemies, since it lacked the ability to fly. Large numbers of these birds were killed by human beings for food. Additionally, pigs that were brought to the islands destroyed a significant portion of the dodos' eggs, creating a severe decline in the dodo population. The species became extinct by the 18th century.

The Steller's sea cow once inhabited the coastal waters of the Commander Islands in the Bering Sea. Russian Sealers, who were the first to record the existence of these creatures in 1741, estimated the entire population to be about 5,000. Their meat was considered a delicacy by Russian sealers, who decimated the entire species by 1768.

The Labrador duck has been extinct since 1875. This species formerly inhabited the coastal regions of northeastern Canada. The extinction of the passenger pigeon was caused by the American westward expansion in the second half of the 19th century. As passenger pigeons became a popular food item, the numbers of this species rapidly diminished. Millions were slaughtered each year and shipped by railway cars to be sold in city markets. Another bird to become extinct because of its use as food was the heath hen, which became extinct about 1932.

The pacific sardine lives along the coasts of North America from Alaska to southern California. Sardines, once a major part of the California fishing industry, are now considered to be "commercially extinct." Another species classified as "commercially extinct" is the New England haddock. Ecologists have also been concerned about the significant reduction in finfish, the Atlantic bluefin tuna, Lake Erie cisco, and blackfins that inhabit Lakes Huron and Michigan
.
More than 200,000 porpoises are killed every year by fishermen seeking tuna in the Pacific. Sea turtles are similarly killed in Caribbean shrimp operations. Some animals are killed because, as carnivores, they compete with the human predator for the right to kill other animals for food, including wild game and domesticated species raised by livestock ranchers. Alaskan hunters are eager to reduce the wolf population in their state because this animal is a predator of moose.

Cougars, coyotes and wolves are considered a menace to the cattle and sheep industries, and livestock ranchers have engaged in a large-scale campaign to exterminate them. Two species of wolves are now endangered, and very few wolves can be found in the United States except in Alaska and northeastern Minnesota. The relatively small number of eagles in the U.S. is largely due to the destruction of this species by livestock ranchers, particularly those in the sheep business.

Herbivorous animals that inhabit rangeland areas are also killed by the livestock industry because they compete with cattle arid sheep for food. Large numbers of kangaroos are being exterminated in Australia, while in the United States livestock ranchers seek to destroy wild horses, wild burros, deer, elk, antelope and prairie dogs.

An ever-increasing amount of beef eaten in the United States is imported from Central and South America. To provide pasture for cattle, these countries have been clearing their priceless tropical rainforests. In 1960, when the U. S. first began to import beef, Central America was blessed with 130,000 square miles of rainforest. But now, less than 80,000 square miles remain. At this rate, the entire tropical rainforests of Central America will be gone in another forty years.

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Mesopotamia was made a desert through deforestation and salinasation in order to grow more grains. Sheep and goats probably contributed but by and large it was just to feed more people. I don't imagine you are calling for an end to the growing of wheat or barley.

You have mentioned China as an example of a place where many people can be fed from a small area because of a primarily vegetarian diet. You fail to mention that their climate is very favorable to annual grain agriculture or the fact that a very high percentage of the land is human manipulated. They have very little wild spaces left. You should ask the panda, among with many other species, if they mind making way for more rice, soy, barley, millet, etc. because it's vegetarian and the Chinese are hungry. You should check out the places in northern China that are much like our upper plains and see the erosion do to the overcropping of wheat.

I don't imagine you can be so naive to think that if we didn't feed grains to livestock that they would find there way to the stomachs of the hungry and that those now well fed would not overpopulate their already overburdened place. Or maybe you are.

People are the problem and not livestock who are only being used inappropriately by humanity as a whole as are most of our domestic crops. Food, plant and animal, is used as a weapon. Control the food, control the people, it's that simple. The only solution, as I have said before, is to take that control back. Develop food systems that include plants and animals that are in accord with the prevailing geographical and climatic conditions. And above all, through just economic and social policies, alleviate the suffering of all people so that they can develop a sense of compassion enough to self impose limits on population and food production which are inextricably intertwined.

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Sure, there are resource-allocation & ethics arguments pertaining to meat & meat production which are bloody valid...

"Butterball's House of Horrors": A PETA Undercover Investigation

...but to imply that irrigating fields & the water for cows is SOMEHOW PERMANENTLY REMOVING WATER from the water cycle...

that's just a bit extreme.

unless you're waterboarding cows... then I've got some serious reservations.

For now? I'm content to have reduced my meat to organic twice weekly events.

I've an idea: why don't we promote RESPECTING our food & ourselves?

Rather than treating everyone & everything as a consumption experience?

"the American Dream": "consumerism & the Ownership Class" - RIP Carlin

Do I Mean Anything to You?...or Am I Landscape to Negotiate?

nah, its just more fun to scream at each other... now that's entertainment!

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"Silent Freedom is Freedom Silenced"
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The frugivores (gorillas, chimpanzees and other primates) have intestinal tracts twelve times the length of the body, clawless hands and alkaline urine and saliva. Their diet is mostly vegetarian, occasionally supplemented with carrion, insects, etc.

Flesh-eating animals lap water with their tongue, whereas vegetarian animals imbibe liquids by a suction process. Humans are classified as primates and are thus frugivores possessing a set of completely herbivorous teeth. Proponents of the theory that humans should be classified as omnivores note that human beings do, in fact, possess a modified form of canine teeth. However, these so-called "canine teeth" are much more prominent in animals that traditionally never eat flesh, such as apes, camels, and the male musk deer.

It must also be noted that the shape, length and hardness of these so-called "canine teeth" can hardly be compared to those of true carnivorous animals. A principle factor in determining the hardness of teeth is the phosphate of magnesia content. Human teeth usually contain 1.5 percent phosphate of magnesia, whereas the teeth of carnivores are composed of nearly 5 percent phosphate of magnesia. It is for this reason they are able to break through the bones of their prey, and reach the nutritious marrow.

Zoologist Desmond Morris makes a case for vegetarianism in his 1967 book, The Naked Ape: "It could be argued that, since our primate ancestors had to make do without a major meat component in their diets we should be able to do the same. We were driven to become flesh eaters only by environmental circumstances, and now that we have the environment under control, with elaborately cultivated crops at our disposal, we might be expected to return to our ancient feeding patterns."

In The Human Story, edited by Marie-Louise Makris (1985), we read: "...recent studies of their teeth reveal that the Australopithecines did not eat meat as a regular part of their diet, and were mainly peaceful vegetarians, rather like chimps or gorillas. The popular image of the murderous ape is now as extinct as the Australopithecines themselves."

Dr. Gordon Latto notes that carnivorous and omnivorous animals can only move their jaws up and down, and that omnivores "have a blunt tooth, a sharp tooth, a blunt tooth, a sharp tooth--showing that they were destined to deal both with flesh foods from the animal kingdom and foods from the vegetable kingdom...

"Carnivorous mammals and omnivorous mammals cannot perspire except at the extremity of the limbs and the tip of the nose; man perspires all over the body. Finally, our instincts; the carnivorous mammal (which first of all has claws and canine teeth) is capable of tearing flesh asunder, whereas man only partakes of flesh foods after they have been camouflaged by cooking and by condiments.

"Man instinctively is not carnivorous," explains Dr. Latto. "...he takes the flesh food after somebody else has killed it, and after it has been cooked and camouflaged with certain condiments. Whereas to pick an apple off a tree or eat some grain or a carrot is a natural thing to do; people enjoy doing it; they don't feel disturbed by it. But to see these animals being slaughtered does affect people; it offends them. Even the toughest of people are affected by the sights in the slaughterhouse.

"I remember taking some medical students into a slaughterhouse. They were about as hardened people as you could meet. After seeing the animals slaughtered that day in the slaughterhouse, not one of them could eat the meat that evening."

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Author R.H. Weldon writes in No Animal Food:

"The gorge of a cat, for instance, will rise at the smell of a mouse or a piece of raw flesh, but not at the aroma of fruit. If a man can take delight in pouncing upon a bird, tear its still living body apart with his teeth, sucking the warm blood, one might infer that Nature had provided him with a carnivorous instinct, but the very thought of doing such a thing makes him shudder. On the other hand, a bunch of luscious grapes makes his mouth water, and even in the absence of hunger, he will eat fruit to gratify taste."

As far back as 1961, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that: "A vegetarian diet can prevent 97% of our coronary occlusions." More recently, Wiiliam S. Collens and Gerald B. Dobkens concluded: "Examination of the dental structure of modern man reveals that he possesses all the features of a strictly herbivorous animal. While designed to subsist on vegetarian foods, he has perverted his dietary habits to accept food of the carnivore. It is postulated that man cannot handle carnivorous foods like the carnivore. Herein may lie the bais for the high incidence of arteriosclerotic disease."

Keith Akers in A Vegetarian Sourcebook (1983), responds to the argument that killing animals for food is natural:

"The main problem with this argument is that it does not justify the practice of meat-eating or animal husbandry as we know it today; it justifies hunting. The distinction between hunting and animal husbandry probably seems rather fine to the man in the street, or even to your typical rule-utilitarian moral philosopher. The distinction, however, is obvious to an ecologist. If one defends killing on the grounds that it occurs in nature, then one is defending the practice as it occurs in nature.

"When one species of animal preys on another in nature, it only preys on a very small proportion of the total species population. Obviously, the predator species relies on its prey for its continued survival. Therefore, to wipe the prey species out through overhunting would be fatal. In practice, members of such predator species rely on such strategies as territoriality to restrict overhunting and to insure the continued existence of its food supply.

"Moreover, only the weakest members of the prey species are the predator's victims: the feeble, the sick, the lame, or the young accidentally separated from the fold. The life of the typical zebra is usually placid, even in lion country; this kind of violence is the exception in nature, not the rule.

"As it exists in the wild, hunting is the preying upon isolated members of an animal herd. Animal husbandry is the nearly complete annihilation of an animal herd. In nature, this kind of slaughter does not exist. The philosopher is free to argue that there is no moral difference between hunting and slaughter, but he cannot invoke nature as a defense of this idea.

"Why are hunters, not butchers, most frequently taken to task by the larger community for their killing of animals? Hunters usually react to such criticism by replying that if hunting is wrong, then meat-hunting must be wrong as well. The hunter is certainly right on one point--the larger community is hypocritical to object to hunting when it consumes the flesh of domesticated animals. If any form of meat-eating is justified, it would be meat from a hunted animal."

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In his 1975 book, Animal Liberation, Australian philosopher Peter Singer writes:

"Killing an animal is in itself a troubling act. It has been said that if we had to kill our own meat we would all be vegetarians. There may be exceptions to that general rule, but it is true that most people prefer not to inquire into the killing of the animals they eat.

"Very few people ever visit a slaughterhouse; and films of slaughterhouse operations are rarely shown on television...Yet those who, by their purchases, require animals to be killed have no right to be shielded from this or any other aspect of the production of the meat they buy.

"If it is distasteful for humans to think about, what can it be like for the animals to experience it?"

Peter Singer concludes in Animal Liberation that "by ceasing to rear and kill animals for food, we can make extra food available for humans that, properly distributed, it would eliminate starvation and malnutrition from this planet. Animal Liberation is Human Liberation, too."

Finally, even if humans really are omnivores as some claim (and this claim is subject to dispute: I would refer these people to Dr. Milton Mills or to the website of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, www.pcrm.org , which advocates a vegan diet, an end to vivisection, etc., for the latest on whether humans are frugivorous or omnivorous), my friend Mareechi Duvvuuri (another Hindu-American!) who once studied sports medicine, pointed out that the diet of natural omnivores is mostly (85 percent) plant food.

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