Why vegan?
In short, vegan means love -- an abiding respect and courtesy for all life.
Further, its fruition coincides with cleaner water, cleaner air, clearer bodies, and widespread reduction of harm and suffering.
Choosing vegan actively supports the cultivation of cruelty-free lives and business practices. It also consciously withdraws economic and moral support from institutions that are inherently cruel, or foster a disrespect toward life, or the planet.*
* a blessing: may the grass-feeding, humane and sustainably managed farms, from which you presently
buy your meats and cheeses, be the only sources of such products you need ever support.
Because Vegan Feels So Free and Nice Going Down:
A well-balanced vegan diet is vibrant and delicious; satisfying and nourishing. Vegan food is emotionally restoring, cruelty-free and incredibly easy to swallow.
For the Environment:
Jungles, temperate forests and native ecosystems worldwide, have been, and are still being ravaged to create space to raise livestock.
Livestock in this country produces 130 times more excrement than the entire human population -- without sewage treatment. This
waste pollutes natural habitat and inevitably leaches into life-promoting aquifers.
For our Health:
A fresh vegan foods diet feels vibrant and vital. A vegan diet offers a path to minimal risk for the onset of obesity, heart disease and diabetes; and minimized risk for cancer and strokes. Vegan farming practices circumvent excessive use of antibiotics, which the livestock industry uses to preserve animal life in unsanitary conditions. This practice offers only resistance-training to already dangerous strains of bacteria and disease.
For the Animals:
Each animal that comprises the farmed population of creatures known popularly as 'food', is sentient -- that is to mean, individual -- with unique feelings and an identifiable personality. Eight billion chickens are killed in America every year. That is 8,000,000,000. Every Year. An infinitesimal number of those chickens live well before meeting their end. 97% of pigs in this country are raised in factory farms under horrendous conditions. Milk cows are continually impregnated to sustain milk production,
while mothers' young are killed, or taken from them and sent to veal cages, where they are kept immobile for life. Consider them
each. Consider them all.
For the People who Occupate this Industry:
The offer and receipt of payment does not justify or rectify cruelty. Support instead, the creation of occupations in industries that heal and nurture life. Why ask anyone else to do something that you yourself would never concede morally to doing yourself?
For the Abatement of Global Warming:
The meat industry is America's leading producer of methane -- twenty times as effective at trapping the atmosphere's heat than carbon dioxide, which the industry also creates prodigiously -- through transportation, heavy refrigeration, and storage.
To Prioritize the Well-Being of All and To Conserve Resources:
The number of pounds of grain necessary to feed livestock far exceeds the weight of meat produced. This grain, or the land from whence it grows, or the efforts expended in its production, could as easily be given over to the healthy production of human food. Less suffering, more food, less hunger, more wealth.
This said, I do not aim or expect to make you a vegan.
But, do please consider the tangible and loving benefits of choosing compassion. The joy you experience may be immense. It may be easy for you. Each vegan choice -- each incremental reduction in the consumption of animal products -- constitutes significant progress toward eventing peace. Eat deliciously. Be well. And be assured that your loving efforts are transforming this world.
Each of us can decide to act with kindness and compassion -- with each humane choice affirming our humanity. A concern for well-being may soon be felt as a passionate love of, and for, all life.
