From: tara@starburst.umd.edu (Tara McDermott)
Newsgroups: rec.food.veg
Subject: Re: A question
Date: 21 Jan 1993 22:18:10 GMT
Organization: University of Maryland, Chesapeake Biological Laboratory
NNTP-Posting-Host: starburst.umd.edu

chandra@chester.cms.udel.edu (Chandrasekher Narayanan) writes:

>I have a question. If every person in the World became vegetarian, would
>there be enough vegetarian food for all ?

From Diet for A New America (John Robbins): 

The livestock population of the United States today consumes enough
grain and soybeans to feed over five times the entire human population
of the country.  -page 350 (Bralove, Mary, "The Food Crisis: the
Shortages May Pit the 'Have Nots' Against the 'Haves'," _Wall Street
Journal_, October 3, 1974, pg 20)

To supply one person with a meat habit food for a year requires
three-and-a-quarter acres.  To supply one lacto-ovo vegetarian with
food for a year requires one-half acre.  To supply one pure vegetarian
requires only one-sizth of an acre.  In other words, a given acreage
can feed twenty times as many people eating a pure vegetarian
diet-style as it could people eating the standard American diet-style.
    -page 352 (Lappe, Frances Moore, _Diet for a Small Planet_, Tenth
Anniversary Edition, Ballantine Books, NY, 1982, pg 69)

Lester Brown of the Overseas Development Council has estimated that if
Americans were to reduce their meat consumption by only 10 percent, it
would free over 12 million tons of grain annually for human
consumption.  That, all by itself, would be enough to adequately feed
every one of the 60 million human beings who will starve to death on
the planet this year.    -page 352 (Resenberger, Boyce, "Curb on U.S.
Waste Urged to Help World's Hungry," _New York Times_, Oct. 25, 1974)

The world's cattle alone, not toomention pigs and chickens, consume a
quantity of food equal to the caloric needs of 8.7 billion
people--nearly double the entire human population of the planet.
     -page 353 (Rensberger, Boyce, "World Food Crisis: Basic Ways of
Life Face Upheaval from Chronic Shortages," _New York Times_, NOvember
5, 2974, pg 14)

So basically, YES, easily.  Not only that, but we'd have a hell of a
lot more fuel at our disposal.  In a pamplet from Beyond Beef, they
state that it takes one whole gallon of gasoline to get one pound of
grain fed beef to the table!  Cattle, in this country produce 20 times
(!) the amount of excrement waste that the U.S. population does.  Not
to mention the huge amount of topsoil erosion that goes on because of
cattle ranching, and the amount of forests cut down in this country,
and in third world countries (such as rainforests).

You didn't ask for this, but it's so disheartening to me that I'll
include it here:  On page 362, Robbins states "At the present rate of
deforestation in the U.S., it won't be long before we never see a
tree, period.  I was stunned toolearn that at the rate we are going,
the U.S. will be stripped completely bare of ALL its forests in 50
years!"  -(Hur, Robin, and Fields, Dr. David, "Are High-Fat Diets
Killing Our Forests?" _Vegetarian Times_, Feb. 1984).

There are so many OTHER aspects to meat eating that are important and
unbelievable and depressing to know that it's so easy to prevent!  I
can't recommend Diet for a New America enough!  Everything I have
quoted in this article came out of the same chapter - All Things Are
Connected.  If you haven't already read this book, I highly suggest
that you do.  It will change your life, it did mine, and countless
other friends. 

If you would like to see more facts posted, or want the references to
the few things that I did not reference, drop me a line.

Tara


--
Tara McDermott               
tara@starburst.umd.edu       
I eat tofu, and I vote.