Reduce Consumption – Go Veg

Billions of animals are harmed and killed every year at the hands of humans. Most of this is to produce meat for food. Clearly one of the simplest ways to reduce this is to reduce your own consumption.

Whether you go vegan, vegetarian, or make a commitment to minimise what animal products you use, this has an effect in a market economy. It may not appear to make much difference over a day or a week, but each month, each year, you follow this practice, you are influencing the economy and saving lives.

Each time you don’t buy meat, this becomes a statistic and whether it is the small take-away business owner, the supermarket chain number cruncher, or the farmer, it is registered and they respond inevitably to the market change.

For more information on eating with compassion, go to our Vegetarianism page. See also Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s advice.

DID YOU KNOW….

• It takes about 50,000 litres of water (11,000 gallons) of water to produce 1 kilo (2.2 pounds) of meat?
• Animals raised for food produce approximately 130 times as much excrement as the entire human population – that’s about 40,000 kilograms (88, 183 pounds) per second!
• Producing one kilo of beef, produces 52 kilograms (114.6 pounds0 of carbon dioxide whereas producing one kilo of wheat produces less than one kilo of carbon dioxide
• The world’s cattle consume enough to feed 8.7 billion people – more than the entire human population