Vegetarianism: Why and How?

In this series of articles, I am exploring the why and how of being a vegetarian from the perspective of one vegetarian (myself). In my prior article (see Part I of the series) I took a brief look at my moral and ethical stance on vegetarianism. In this section, I promised to look at the economic and distributive benefits of vegetarianism. These are the practical points that our supposedly pragmatic capitalist system seems to be so concerned with.

The bottom line of food distribution is nutritive energy, its quantity and quality. I begin with the assumption that feeding more people is better than feeding less, in order that world hunger can be eliminated. Given this assumption, how do we acquire the most distributable nutritive energy? The answer is mass vegetarianism. In order to feed the most people the most food, we must look to grow and distribute nutritive energy directly from the source of that energy, which is plant-life itself. Economically this makes sense, since many available farmlands that are used to feed the cattle that stock our meat could be used instead to feed three times that number through sustainable growth of grains, fruit, and vegetables.

From a distribution standpoint this makes sense as well, since grains, beans, fruits, and vegetables have much longer shelf lives than meat, are more easily transportable, and provide more variety of nutrition. By feeding cattle with arable land, we remove one layer of the energy available from that land. Instead of getting the full production of energy available, we instead tie up enormous amounts of energy in raising domesticated cattle to slaughter, and which will provide a quarter of the energy and nutrition the land is capable of producing.