Should We Eat Meat?

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It would take just 40 million tons of food to eliminate the most extreme cases of world hunger, but a staggering 760 million tons of grain will be used to feed farmed animals this year. The world's cattle alone consume a quantity of food equal to the caloric needs of 8.7 billion people.

It's wasteful to feed perfectly edible food to farmed animals rather than feed it directly to malnourished people. According to the Worldwatch Institute, "[M]eat consumption is an inefficient use of grain—the grain is used more efficiently when consumed by humans. Continued growth in meat output is dependent on feeding grain to animals, creating competition for grain between affluent meat-eaters and the world's poor."

Simply put, we could produce more food for more people if we stopped squandering our resources to raise animals. Vegfam, a U.K.-based charity that funds sustainable plant-food projects, estimates that a 10-acre farm can support 60 people by growing soy, 24 people by growing wheat, or 10 people by growing corn—but only two people by raising cattle.

According to The New York Times, Americans eat twice as much meat as the average person worldwide. Dr. Walt Willett, professor of medicine at Harvard University and author of Eat, Drink and Weigh Less, says, "If we changed the way we ate, modifying what we eat, we could practically end the global food crisis, since eating more crops and much less red meat … would free up resources to feed the world."

Dr. Waldo Bello, executive director of the Institute for Food and Development Policy, concurs that raising animals for meat is a waste of resources. He states, "The American fast-food diet and the meat-eating habits of the wealthy around the world support a world food system that diverts food resources from the hungry." Researchers and policymakers who study the problem of world hunger agree that we have plenty of resources to feed vegans—but not nearly enough to feed our addiction to meat.