I know it is a little awkward to say “I became vegetarian”, but I’ve got good reasons. I will accept any kind of criticisms after you read this post, so please bear with me for a while.
Well, first of all, what is your image on vegetarian??
Someone so religious?
Well, there are many religions which prohibit eating certain kinds of meat…
Extreme zoophilists??
Sea Sheppard…though I don’t know they are vegetarian or not.
Celebrities for their beauty???
Natalie Portman is vegetarian because she loves animals, but I put her for her beauty!
I had the same images like these.
However, the reason I became vegetarian is none of them.
THIS ONE EITHER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Wow…this is kind of shocking picture. I was just googling “vegetarian” and found this…
Anyways, I’m typical Japanese who lightly believes Shintoism and Buddhism. If you are not monk, this kind of people does not care eating meat.
I think meat diet is a part of human culture (personally I think whaling is fine as long as we don’t catch them too much and we should not blame Koreans for eating dogs. These are all cultures!)
Also I don’t have such a good face to care about maintaining beauty, so those are not the reasons to be vegetarian for me.
The reason I became vegetarian is because I wanted to do something good to the environment.
“well...OK. But what do you mean??”
If you thought like this, that’s fine. I’ll explain you why! Let’s pick up some articles and reports which are officially published.
1. Energetic Efficiencies
Which do you think more energy efficient; plant-based diet or animal-based diet? Gidon Eshel and Pamela A. Martin from University of Chicago had research on this. To determine which diet is more energy efficient, they provided a table of efficiency on each food item.
Take a look at the table below.
| Food item | 100 ×(kcal protein/ kcal input) | kcal total/kcal protein | 100 ×(kcal output/ kcal input) |
| Chicken | 6.3 | 2.9 | 18.1 |
| Milk | 5.3 | 3.9 | 20.6 |
| Eggs | 3.6 | 3.1 | 11.2 |
| Beef | 2.9 | 2.3 | 6.4 |
| Pork | 1.5 | 2.5 | 3.7 |
| Lamb | 0.5 | 2.3 | 1.2 |
| Herring | 50.0 | 2.2 | 110 |
| Tuna | 5.0 | 1.2 | 5.8 |
| Salmon (farmed) | 2.5 | 2.3 | 5.7 |
| Shrimp | 0.7 | 1.3 | 0.9 |
| Corn | | | 250 |
| Soy | | | 415 |
| Apple | | | 110 |
| Potatoes | | | 123 |
Eshel and Martin defined energy efficiency as the percentage of fossil fuel input energy that is retrieved as edible energy. Did you notice that the vegetables (fruit) in the last four are surprisingly high?
Please keep this fact in your mind. We’ll see the problems on water in the next post! Take care till then!
Bibliography: Eshel, G., & Martin, P. A. (2006). Diet, Energy, and Global Warming. Earth Interactions , 1-17.
This is a good post, but you could explain why a plant based diet is more energy efficient. Basically it is just a matter of elementary thermodynamics. People will be more convinced if you point out to them that every transfer of energy (including eating) is inefficient, so it must (by physical laws that we have never witnessed any violation of) be more energy efficient to eat plants directly rather than eat an animal that eats plants. An enormous amount of energy is lost in the transfer from plant to animal.
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