I think the economic reasons for not eating meat actually outweigh the ethical reasons. Grass-fed beef isn’t the average American eats, and is a fraction of a fraction of the tiniest percentage of meat out there on the market. And also… if you want to factor in the amount of water it takes to raise, feed and lead a grass-fed cow to slaughter, the negative environmental impact isn’t that much better than the factory farm, corn-fed model.

I used to have a revised food pyramid that simplified this… broke the traditional pyramid down by the foods that had the most harmful impact… don’t know where I have that in a digital format anymore…

Here’s a good run-down by Vegan Outreach, an org that came to be back when I first became vegan almost 14 years ago:

http://www.veganoutreach.org/whyvegan/environment.html

Yay for bringing up the discussion!

good post. one of the reasons why i don’t partake. Jon Josef aka bloodclot, vocalist for the cro-mags, has been talking about this for a good while. while not a solution in and of itself, a nice dump tax would help. the mechanism of a corporation’s purpose-making profit- can work to human benefit if negative practices run against the purpose and hinder profit.

There are ethical reasons (which I am sympathetic to) to not eat animals, but I don’t there there are valid economic ones. The real question is which foods are being subsidized by the US government (that would be corn).