Dietary Choices – Vegan Food
Sustenance is the basis of human life, without food and water we couldn’t continue to live. As the human population grows, we require ever-greater amounts of food to sustain the world’s population. This coupled with growing wealth, leading to more people wanting meat and complex foods, has caused agriculture and livestock farming to develop new techniques to produce more food faster, creating a serious strain on the world’s ecosystems. The world’s meat consumption leads to deforestation, releasing vast quantities of CO2 and causing a loss of habitats for wildlife (Greenpeace). What we decide to eat can make a big difference – in order to produce 1kg of chicken meat, it takes about 3.2kg of feed, a very inefficient means of producing food to eat. Furthermore, large quantities of meat are produced in factory-like farms, where animals are kept in inhumane conditions and pumped full of antibiotics in order for them to survive and quickly grow. A vegan diet, by definition, contains no animal products, and therefore none of the CO2 emissions associated with the production of meat and dairy. On average, vegan produce 406kg less CO2 per year, a significant difference, especially when compared to the other habits in this article – although a vegan diet also has the most severe impact on daily life, in comparison to other habits.