by William Smithy

Created on: May 18, 2009   Last Updated: June 04, 2009

To some, the idea of switching to a completely meatless diet flies in the face of contemporary knowledge. It is an idea that evokes nothing less than fear in the minds of Americans as they struggle against decades of lies and propaganda promoted by the meat industries in this country. False concepts have been heavily promoted through years of carefully constructed marketing and advertising that receives millions upon millions of dollars from the meat industries. In Oklahoma alone, the cattle industry is spending 2 million dollars this year to promote their product, a product that is over produced by the state's nearly 56,000 beef producers. It's actually the law that every cattle producer pay 1 dollar for every head of cattle to an organization strictly set up to promote beef, the Cattleman's Beef Board or the CBB. For every 1,000,000 head of cattle there is elected one board member and the CBB is up to 106 members now. Do a simple multiplication problem and that makes roughly 100,000,000 head of cattle being sold to slaughter every year, generating 100 million dollars a year for the promotion of beef alone.

The fact is, human beings don't need meat to survive. The raising of beef alone is an incredibly inefficient process. It has been said that the grain it takes to feed one cow could feed ten people. The environmental impact of meat production is devastating the American landscape. In North Carolina, the sewage waste generated from hog farming is four times the amount of the state's 6 million residents, which no regulations attached to its disposal.

Another problem attached to being a meat consumer is that it supports the inhumane and uncouth practices of raising thousands of animals within tightly confined areas. These animals are forced to wallow in their own feces, creating a very unclean environment in which viruses and bacteria thrive in. In order to counteract these unsanitary conditions, farmers are forced to rely heavily on antibiotics, which accounts for a majority of our nations antibiotic supplies. These viruses and bacteria mutate and become resistant to the antibiotics used on them and become harder and harder to get rid of. Not only that, but once these viruses and bacteria jump species to infect humans, our population can no longer rely on the antibiotics at our disposal.

If you in an arid region such as the southwest like I do, you will know that the issue of water conservation is a huge problem. Natural Aquifers

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