Thanksgiving arrives every year with a heated debate over how to best cook that plump and juicy turkey. But the idea of a tofu turkey (also known as a “tofurkey”) has gone from a joke a couple years ago to a reality for many. While vegetarianism has been practiced for over a thousand years in some countries, it is a relatively new concept in the West. And so, with the question cropping up more and more often, should we eat meat?
Raising animals for food requires massive amounts of resources. Of all the agricultural land in the U.S., 80 percent is used to raise animals for food and to grow the grain to feed them—that’s almost half the total land mass of the lower 48 states. Chickens, pigs, cattle, and other animals raised for food are the primary consumers of half the water in the U.S.
Each day, factory farms produce billions of pounds of manure, much of which ends up in lakes, rivers, and even drinking water. Farmed animals produce about 130 times as much excrement as does the entire human population of the United States—87,000 pounds of waste per second!
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