1. Meat industry’s water consumption and water pollution alone make vegetarian diets far less damaging to the environment.

2. There are 3 big reasons for reducing meat consumption: health, environment, and ethics (horrible treatment of animals and of meat workers)

Oh, and let’s remember abuse of antibiotics, exposing humans to serious and resistant diseases such as MRSA. This falls under all 3 categories above.

Unless you also go loco. (Localivory)

We’re close to weekday vegetarianism, but rather than using meat at weekends, we reduce the amount of meat in most of our meals. The bulk is wild game–venison. We live in good farm country, and take advantage of it. We get terrific produce from April through November, and I watch the chickens that provide our eggs scratching while I buy our eggs.

We eat a lot of whole grains (I keep cooked brown rice, barley, or millet on hand–the rice cooker is one of the best kitchen purchases I’ve made), and dried beans (did you know that a rice cooker can cook dried beans better than you can on the stovetop?); I bake all our bread, and if a meal has meat in it, it’s as a flavoring, not as the meal focus.

I estimate that of the 21 weekly meals (x 2 people), more than half are vegetarian–especially breakfasts and lunches; meat appears mostly at evening meals and about 3 a week are vegetarian. We might use 2-3 lbs of meat a week for the two of us amongst all 21 x 2 meals–hard to know as we butcher our own venison and don’t weigh it. 1 LB or so of meat will go in a stir-fry-type meal, heavy on vegetables, served over rice or pasta, that ends up providing 2 meals each. Occasionally we splurge on a meat-heavy meal–maybe once a month?

I was raised in a meat-heavy household, and honestly, I don’t miss it at all. We eat well–the food’s plentiful, healthy, and tasty–and with the added benefit of that while what we spend on meat (hunting licenses, travel) is hard to quantify, I am certain my grocery bills are WAY lower than most folks.

No, it does not. If Americans ate about half the meat they eat now or less, they would not miss it nutritionally and there would be vast benefits.

It is, however, not a 100% all or nothing proposition. If you utterly and instantly removed meat from the American diet today, and people just increased their consumption of the other foods they ate to make up for the calories (as necessary) there would likely be nutritional stress for many individuals that would be manifest primarily among infants, children, etc. because of the demands of growth.

Consider this: In South Africa, a fair amount of wild game meat is eaten. If you removed the wild game farming and replaced it wherever possible with growing veggies, there would be very little change because most of the wild game is harvested from areas where you can’t grow the veggies.