Why Plant-Based?
At Kung Food Express Café, we believe that's a fair question! The reasons why we serve only plant-based, or vegan foods, are various and complex, but their essence is that widespread adoption of the plant-based diet is one of the best, if not the best, ways to save the Earth and all of its inhabitants, animal and human. Simply put, our reasons can be distilled down to four, and not necessarily in this order of importance:
- It's good for you.
- It's good for people other than you.
- It's good for the animals.
- It's good for the natural environment.
1. It's good for you.
A well-balanced plant-based diet benefits you physically because it is nutritionally very efficient: it's high in vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, phytochemicals and roughage, and (when designed wisely) is low in fat, particularly saturated fat, and contains no cholesterol. Moreover, although plant-based foods are not necessarily toxin-free, they do not carry toxicities from pesticides, antibiotics, growth hormones, heavy metals and other dangerous chemicals in the same high concentrations as are to be found higher up on the food chain with milk, meat and eggs. Contrary to much popular misconception, plant-based diets have more than adequate protein content. (For that matter, some diseases such as osteoporosis are now being tied to excessive protein intake as a possible or even likely cause.)
Pathologically speaking, anything other than a plant-based diet can be a real killer. The evidence is pouring in: over the past four decades, numerous scientific studies have established strong statistical correlations between the nations that consume the most meat, eggs, and diary products, and the nations that suffer the highest rates of heart attack, atherosclerosis, stroke, osteoporosis, diabetes, hypoglycemia, obesity, renal disease, and many types of cancer, including bowel, breast, lung, ovarian and prostate cancers. Moreover, many of these studies have established that developing countries that are becoming increasingly "Westernized," with the corresponding diet rich in animal-based foods, are being visited with increasing rates of the diseases just mentioned. Animal flesh is a notorious carrier of food-borne illnesses from salmonella, campylobacter, E. coli, and most recently, the prions associated with bovine spongiform encephalopathy ("Mad Cow Disease") in livestock, and quite possibly its human analogue, Creutzfeld-Jacob Disease. Indeed, the evidence cannot be ignored, brushed aside, or explained away much longer.
None of this is to mention that adopting a plant-based diet benefits your spiritual side as well, by putting you on the path toward greater awareness of, and concern for, the welfare of all sentient beings, human and non-human alike. (For more detailed information about the nutritional benefits of specific plant-based foods, see our "What Is...?" page.)
2. It's good for people other than you.
Depending on the animal in question, it takes from three to twenty pounds of vegetable protein to create one pound of animal protein. Thus it has been said in many places that animal agriculture works like "a protein factory in reverse." However, not only does this process squander protein resources; it obliterates carbohydrates and fiber, antioxidants, phytochemicals, and many other nutrients altogether.
In an editorial published in the Los Angeles Times in May 2002, Jeremy Rifkin, a widely respected author on issues of worldwide food supply, traces the occurrences of famine directly to our increasing tendency to use precious food resources as animal feed. According to Rifkin, 36 percent of all the world's grains are fed to food animals; in the U.S. the number is a staggering 70 percent. In emerging nations such as China, Egypt, Mexico and Thailand, the portion of arable land used to grow feed for livestock has increased since 1950 between threefold and thirtyfold, depending on the country. An acre of cereal produces five times more protein than an acre devoted to meat production; an acre of legumes (beans, peas, lentils) can produce 10 times more protein; leafy vegetables 15 times more protein. (Read the entire article)
If soybeans, vegetables and grains were fed directly to humans, instead of to animals whose lives were forced into existence in any event, we could put an end to the obscenely unjust exchanges of food resources that take place between the U.S. and many Latin American countries, for example. (Read more about it here)
3. It's good for the animals.
All over the world, more than 50 billion animals are slaughtered for food each year. In the U.S. alone the number is 10 billion. (These numbers do not even account for the roughly 90 billion marine creatures, large and small, that are fished from the world's waterways annually.) Every man, woman and child in America consumes, on average, 35 land-based animals each year, and upwards of 100 animals overall. This equates to almost 900 animals killed every second in the U.S. alone. Moreover, while these animals are still alive, the twentieth-century concerns for "efficiency" and "productivity" have condemned these animals to an unspeakably horrid existence that is widely documented in print, in films and on video. (For a graphic demonstration of the manifold abuses of farm animals particularly, visit The Animals' Voice.)
The philosophy that underlies animal rights can be complicated, but for the most part it can be distilled to a single general principle of ethics: It is always and everywhere wrong to cause harm, intense suffering, and premature death of sentient beings whenever there is no morally compelling reason to cause them. Because humans can live happy, prosperous and productive lives without eating, wearing, and otherwise consuming animal products, the use of these products does not constitute a morally compelling reason that would justify our mistreatment and killing of animals. It's not only a matter of compassion, but also of simple common sense, to not cause innocent creatures to suffer and die when you don't have to.
4. It's good for the natural environment.
All we ever seem to hear about it is how much the automobile industry pollutes our environment. However, the production of meat, eggs and dairy products also takes a staggering toll on the world's ecosystems:
Water Pollution: According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the runoff from factory farms pollutes our rivers and lakes more than all other industries combined. In the U.S. alone, animals raised for food produce 130 times more excrement than the entire human population—86,000 pounds per second. That's nearly 1.4 billion tons of excrement per year; 20 tons per household per year, and 770 pounds per household per week. A typical pig factory farm generates as much raw waste as a city of 50,000 people. Chicken, hog, and cattle excrement have polluted 35,000 miles of rivers in 22 states and contaminated groundwater in 17 states.
Water Use: Raising animals for food consumes nearly half the water used in the United States. It takes 2,500 gallons of water to produce a pound of beef, but only 25 gallons to produce a pound of wheat. A carnivorous diet requires 4,200 gallons of water per day. A vegetarian diet requires 300 gallons of water per day.
Land Use: Of all agricultural land in the U.S., nearly 80 percent is used to raise animals for food. More than 260 million acres of U.S. forest have been cleared to create cropland to grow grain to feed farmed animals, and about 85 percent of the seven billion tons of topsoil lost in the U.S. each year has been directly attributed to raising livestock. Twenty times more land is required to feed a meat-eater than a vegetarian. (A meat-eater requires roughly 3.25 acres of land to feed him- or herself per year, whereas a vegetarian requires 1/6 of an acre.)
Rainforest: About 214,000 acres of rainforest, comprising an area greater than that of New York City, are destroyed every day. Some of this is so that beef cattle can graze, while some it is to grow crops to feed factory-farmed animals. More than 2.9 million acres of rainforest were destroyed in the 2004-2005 crop season in order to grow crops that feed chickens and other animals in factory farms.
For every pound of beef produced in rainforest countries, approximately 220 square feet of rainforest are cleared to grow the required cattle feed. Through this clearing approximately 2,600 pounds of living matter will in the best of circumstances be displaced, or destroyed altogether. This living matter includes roughly 20 to 30 different plant species, over 100 insect species, and dozens of birds, mammals and reptiles. What is more, along with the biomass found in coral reefs, rainforest vegetation is said to be one of the most promising sources of heretofore-undiscovered chemical compounds for treating many diseases that were once thought to be intractable. These resources are simply laid to waste when rainforest is cleared. Even worse, unlike coniferous forest land, tropical rainforest can never be replaced once it has been cleared.
Energy Use: The meat, egg and dairy industries are heavy consumers of fossil-fuel resources. Raising animals for food requires more than one-third of all the raw materials and fossil fuels used in the United States. The best animal-food enterprise returns a paltry 34.5 percent of the invested fossil-fuel energy as food energy, measured in terms of caloric expenditure. In contrast, the poorest crop enterprise returns a whopping 328 percent. In other words, the least-efficient plant-based food is nearly ten times as energy-efficient as the most-efficient animal food!
Global Warming: Animal agriculture of all kinds causes global warming by emitting both carbon dioxide and methane, two highly potent greenhouse gases. In "Diet, Energy and Global Warming", two scientists at the University of Chicago calculate that switching from the average American diet to a vegetarian one causes a 50 percent greater cut in climate warming than switching from the average car to a hybrid such as a Toyota Prius, thus suggesting that a shift toward a plant-based diet should be at least as high a priority as advocating improved fuel economy. (Read this essay online)
Few people recognize the impact of rainforest destruction and the production of rainforest beef on climate change. For example, it's becoming increasingly well-known that burning one gallon of gasoline in an internal-combustion engine releases about 19 pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But clearing and burning enough rainforest to produce just one hamburger releases 165 pounds of carbon dioxide.
As for methane gas, animal belching, flatulence, and feces are the largest sources of airborne methane. According to the EPA, methane is 21 times more effective than carbon dioxide in trapping heat in the atmosphere. In "A New Global Warming Strategy", Noam Mohr, a physicist graduated from Yale and Penn (and a former lobbyist on global warming with the U.S. Public Interest Research Group), predicts that methane from the billions of animals raised on factory farms will be the most significant source of climate change over the next half-century, not cars and power plants. (Read this essay online)