UN Advocates a Vegan Diet – Some Food for Thought

January 11, 2012May 6, 2015 Sarah Taylor Environmentally Friendly, Healthy, Reasons to Go Vegan, Sarah Taylor

While the US leads the world in many things, we seem to be sadly behind in the area of food.

Huge corporate interests lobby hard to keep the public from seeing just how gruesome the slaughterhouses are (if you knew, you wouldn’t eat their meat,) just how filthy and cruel the dairy farms are (if you knew, you wouldn’t eat their cheese,) just how dangerous genetically modified foods are (if you knew, you wouldn’t eat their products) and just how damaging factory farms are to our environment (if you knew, you’d go vegan).

The meat dairy and egg industry — Huge corporate interests lobby hard to keep the public from seeing and knowing what goes on behind the scenes. Image: Shutterstock.

Many European countries do not subscribe to some of our common food production practices; for example, they are so concerned about the risks of eating genetically modified foods that they have completely banned them. Yet our government keeps telling us that genetically modified foods are completely healthy. If that’s true, then why have so many countries banned them? I don’t have a degree in agriculture but I do have a good deal of common sense, and common sense is telling me that something smells fishy.

The UN is urging a meat and dairy-free diet

UN report urges veganism — A recent UN report claims that “a global shift towards a vegan diet is vital to saving the world from hunger, fuel poverty and the worst impacts of climate change”(The Guardian). Image: Shutterstock. Modification: TVW.

There are many reasons to support a vegan diet, but I’m just one vegan from Gig Harbor, Washington. You may not be swayed by me, but you might be swayed by the United Nations.

The UN is now publicly urging the world’s citizens to move to a vegan diet. As The Guardian published, a recent UN report claims that “a global shift towards a vegan diet is vital to saving the world from hunger, fuel poverty and the worst impacts of climate change”.

The report also points out that as the world’s population approaches over 9 billion people by 2050, it will not be possible to sustain the per capita consumption of meat and dairy products that we are currently eating. We will deplete our resources if we attempt to do so, noting that “agriculture, particularly meat and dairy products, accounts for 70% of global freshwater consumption, 38% of the total land use and 19% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions,”

For a political organization like the UN to strongly advocate the vegan diet is enormously predictive and important. They put legs behind the vegan diet, when many are trying to convince you that the vegan diet is just something that those California hippies are still trying to push. Perhaps those California hippies were decades ahead of their time.

Cover image: Shutterstock.

The UN is urging a meat and dairy-free diet

Sarah Taylor

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