How many people are there on the planet? 6 billion? How much starvation is there? Plenty. It is indisputable that the higher we eat on the food chain, the more food and resources we are consuming.

Think of all the plant material that a steer eats. 10 times its weight in a lifetime. How much fresh drinking water it drinks and how much water goes into producing its meat. Thousands of gallons. How much energy and manpower had to go into producing the 10x its weight in feed and in raising the livestock and then converting it into meat.

In fact, it requires seven times more land to feed an omnivore than it does a vegetarian. 3 1/2 acres per year as compared to 1/2 acre. Someone on the Atkins diet probably requires double this amount of land because they are consuming so much meat.

An SUV gets half the mileage per gallon as a regular car. As omnivores, we are like SUVs consuming 7 times more food than necessary. I'm talking about the food that we ate, and the food that our animal bretheren ate. We are consuming the fresh water we drank and all of the fresh water that the steer drank and all of the fresh water that was used to produce the plant material the steer ate plus all the water used to process the meat.

Read "Diet for a Small Planet," or "Diet for a New America."

Most of the people in the developing world are for the most part, vegetarian, and the incidence of obesity is far less than here in America where we consume about as much meat as any nation in the world.

I am concerned about world hunger, and it makes plain sense that the lower on the food chain we all eat, the more agrible land is available for the rest of the world.

Beakybird