Vegetarianism in a Nutshell: Human Rights

The third reason for adopting a vegetarian diet is human rights. Right now, 1.3 billion people, more than 20 percent of the world's population, are living in abject poverty. Right now, 800 million people are suffering from what the United Nations calls "nutritional deficiency." That's a euphemism: They're starving. Every year, 40 million people die from starvation-related causes.

It is depressing to consider that throughout the last big famine in Ethiopia, that country was exporting desperately needed soy and linseed to Europe to feed to farmed animals. The same relationship held true throughout the famine in Somalia in the early 1990s.

And the same relationship holds true between Latin America and the United States today. For example, two-thirds of the agriculturally productive land in Central America is devoted to raising farmed animals, almost all of whom are exported or eaten by the wealthy few in these countries.

The U.N. Commission on Nutritional Challenges for the 21st century said that unless we make major changes, 1 billion children will be permanently handicapped over the next 20 years as a result of inadequate caloric intake. The first step toward averting this tragedy, according to the commission, is to encourage human consumption of traditional plant foods, like beans, nuts, grains, fruits, and vegetables. So the question is: Why are we funneling huge amounts of grain, soybeans, and corn through all the animals we use for food, even as so many people on the planet starve? Why do we eat animal products that make us fat when we could choose a vegetarian diet instead and help feed the world's hungry?

On the domestic front, a book called Fast Food Nation came out a few years ago. In the book, investigative journalist Eric Schlosser details the human abuse in slaughterhouses and includes the information that slaughterhouse workers have nine times the injury rate of coal miners in Appalachia, that some slaughterhouses have 300 percent turnover rates, and that many slaughterhouses reserve the worst jobs for people who are in this country illegally and thus can't defend their own rights.

And in 2005, the organization Human Rights Watch issued a report that found that "[m]eatpacking is the most dangerous factory job in America. . . . Nearly every worker interviewed for this report bore physical signs of a serious injury suffered from working in a meat or poultry plant. . . . Every country has its horrors, and this industry is one of the horrors in the United States." Workers in slaughterhouses are constantly exposed to knives, kicking by large animals as they hang upside-down on conveyor belts, extreme temperatures, and animals' bodily fluids.

The truth is that eating meat, eggs, and dairy products supports an industry that abuses both workers and animals and wastes enormous amounts of food that should be fed to the world's starving people.