- Much higher resource utilization
- More people eating non-veg means more land required
- Tough to find fruit juices
- Global Warming
- Water trouble
- Emotional Garbage
I learnt this from Bawa (Khurshed Batliwala). Normally 3 people can eat one chicken. For that 1 chicken to come to 3 people's plates, it needs to grow for atleast 3 months (most conservative estimate). 3 months means 90 days. A chicken will eat an average of 100 grams of grains per day. Which means in 90 days, it will end up eating maybe 9 KGs of grains. How many people can we feed with 9KGs of grain? Atleast 90, if not more. Which means 3 people eat the food of 90 people!! So one person eats the food of atleast 30 people. We can call them..... modern day "Rakshasas" :) No wonder so many people sleep hungry everyday!!
So if everyone starts eating meat, more and more land is required to feed the chicken. But we all know that the total number of land area on earth is constant - it doesn't keep on expanding proportionately with the non-vegetarian appetite!! So what is happening is more and more land which was earlier used to cultivate organically grown vegetables and fruits, is now being used to grow grains for the non-vegetarian food industry. Tall trees are cut, and that land is used to grow grains for chicken. I remember in my childhood days - there were weeks and months when I used to eat grapes and oranges and sitafal. Now I don't even know when the grapes came and went, when the season for oranges and other fruits came and disappeared!! Apples cost over Rs.150 per kilo in Hyderabad. One Orange there costs over Rs.15!! Eating fruits has become more of a luxury these days!!
Growing up in Suburban Mumbai, during school days, I used to find a fruit juicewala in almost every corner. Look around these days - they have all disappeared. Less land is available today to grow fruits - and whatever is available, the fruits are sent to manufacturers of Maaza, Fruiti etc. So what we gulp down our throats are juices with preservatives and chemicals - something which has made our immune system weak and created a frenzy of diseases never before witnessed in human history.
Whenever an animal is cut, it releases smelly toxic greenhouse warming gases such as Methane. If you add up billions of animals across the world, it adds up to approx 18% of global greenhouse warming gases. This is much higher than the 13% emission from gases of all the cars and factories in the world put together. You can get tons of information from Earthsave.
Vegetables need approximately 90-100 litres of water for every 500 grams. This includes the amount of water needed right from putting a seed to getting the vegetables. Fruits need about 200-300 litres because they have to usually become tall trees first. 500 grams of chicken on the other hand needs more than 3,000 litres of water. This includes the water needed for the food that it eats as well!! Imagine if the entire country eats so much of chicken, all the drinkable water being consumed by them - no wonder we have a severe water shortage in so many areas of this country!! Goat-meat needs 7,000 litres of water for every 500 grams served and beef needs a whopping 15,000 litres!! For more information, read the book "The Food Revolution" by John Robbins - a person who left his Billion-Dollar stake in Baskin-Robbins Ice-cream to research on vegetarianism. You can get this book on rediff or Amazon.
Ever faced a situation when someone came close to physically hit you? How do you feel? Exactly the same way, an animal also goes through. It's nervous system is constantly under heavy pressure throughout it's entire life. The heart beat is abnormally faster. It keeps on releasing chemicals in the body while feeling nervous, angry, frustrated, etc. These chemicals is what we imbibe when we eat non-vegetarian food. Look at all those cultures which are predominantly non-vegetarian - entire countries have become unstable!! Infact, every act and strategy of these countries is based on fear and insecurity. It has destroyed the mindsets of entire cultures in many countries in the west and middle east. It has caused more and more violence, lack of trust, fear and insecurity - the same feelings which usually animals go through!!
In short, we need to really look into our eating habits and our state of mind. Because our quality of life depends entirely on our state of mind. And our state of mind depends a lot on what food we eat everyday!!
