Ike, if you'd do some research you'd learn that Beef is the one of the most environmentally damaging substance on the planet. It takes 2000 gallons of water to create a single pound of beef, and the majority of rainforest deforestation is to support cattle ranching--not to mention the fact that it takes 10 pounds of grain to produce a single pound of beef. It's wildly inefficient. Cows also release an extremely high amount of greenhouse gases, heating the Earth and damaging the envirornment--while they suffer the entire time from disgusting overfeeding and chemical injections.
The cost in gas, deforestation, water, and simply animal suffering is extraordinary. There's no way to pretend it's efficient.
This is pretty much it, we can rattle our pans about whatever the forget here, but the fact remains that nothing will change.
If you want to make any substantial changes to the food industry, this will be your first hurdle.
You keep saying my work is in vain, but that's so obviously not true. The average consumer will eat around 7000 animals in their lifetime. I've cut that down (almost to zero) and done the same for around 6-10 other people (some still eat a little meat). That means that 10 vegetarians will save seventy-thousand animals. I've convinced most of these people between the ages of 14 and 24, so I obviously haven't cut their count down to zero, but perhaps to just 1/6th of what it would be otherwise. With some basic calculations, that suggests if I died today I would've prevented the deaths of sixty-thousand animals.
Animals are raised as per demand. If you eat around one animal per day in terms of meat consumption (and most people will) you are saving one small creature from death every single day. If you convince other people to do the same, you multiply your impact. What if they convince someone else to do the same? You create waves of influence that will exponentially save life. To say it's meaningless is utterly ridiculous.
This is a Pro-Vegan website I've sourced frequently on this exactly issue, but unless you can find anything wrong their statistics, it looks extremely well-researched:
http://www.countinganimals.com/how-many-animals-does-a-vegetarian-save/The argument of 'haha vegan I'm gonna go eat some MEAT' is really kinda laughable. It gets an eye-raise at best. Like, you're already eating meat. It's not somehow worse for you to eat it now. Do you also burn plastic in a bin or remove your cars filter because you hate eco-activists and want to show them what's-what?
