World Vegetarian Day

If you've been waiting for years to try tofu, this Saturday may be the perfect day for you. October 1st, 2011 is World Vegetarian Day which initiates Vegetarian Awareness Month. It's surprisingly hard to find statistics on what percentage of America and the world follow a vegetarian diet. The US is estimated around 3% for people who completely abstain from meat, poultry, and fish, and around 1% for people who follow a vegan diet, which abstain from meat, poultry, fish, eggs, dairy, and usually honey (and any other animal products). The main reason it is difficult to put an exact number on how many people follow a vegetarian diet is because the term is very broad. Here are some of the most common terms for varying degrees of vegetarianism:

Vegan - no animal products of any sort including meat, poultry, eggs, dairy, honey, some red food dyes (derived from bugs), leather, etc.

Lacto-ovo Vegetarian (most common kind of vegetarian) - no meat, poultry, or fish, but will eat dairy products, cheese, and most other animal products

Pesco Vegetarian - no meat or poultry, but will eat fish, as well as other animal products

"Flexitarian" - a new catchall term for people who abstain from meat to varying degrees. Can be anything from usually avoiding red meat, to almost always following a vegetarian diet with the exception of one or two dishes.

There are hundreds of reasons people choose to follow a plant based diet, and almost every vegetarian has a different reason (or many reasons) for why they decide to abstain from meat. Here are just a few of those reasons:

• Conserve resources: it takes about 10x as much land, 15x as much water, and 10x as much fossil fuel to produce one pound of animal protein vs one pound of soy protein. This means that by following a plant based diet we could feed 10x as many people using the same number of resources that one person eating meat would use.

• Improve your health: it's no secret that fruits and vegetables help to improve our health. By increasing our fruit and vegetable consumption you decrease your risk of heart disease, obesity, hypertension, cancer, and a huge list of other diseases. 

• Cut your costs: replacing meat with beans for dishes, or even just replacing some meat with beans, cuts costs tremendously. A can of beans (3 servings of protein) costs about $0.85, whereas a pound of meat (3 - 4 servings of protein) costs between $2 and $5. Natural and organic varieties of each cost substantially more, but plant based proteins are still significantly cheaper than animal proteins.

• Kinder to animals: this one seems obvious-- no one wants to be killed, cooked and eaten. The common comeback is that people are meant to eat animals. Both of these points are true, but both have complicated issues surrounding them. While people are meant to eat animals, we aren't meant to eat nearly as many animals as we do. Because of our over-consumption animal farms have turned into animal factories, where most animals don't see the light of day and are only protected from spreading severe infections all over the world by being sprayed and injected with loads and loads of antibiotics. So it's not so much the killing of animals, but the treatment of animals before they are killed that is an issue. 

Although I spent a year as a vegan (sort of-- I cheated on family birthdays and major holidays, but I usually followed a vegan diet), I wouldn't define myself as anything close to vegetarian. My goal personally isn't to stop consuming meat, but to reduce the amount of meat that I eat so that I appreciate and celebrate every bite of bacon and enjoy. Vegetarian diets are not meant for everyone, but people who follow a vegetarian diet are committed to making the world a better place, and that is something certainly worth celebrating! So happy World Vegetarian Day-- I know our house will enjoy tofu and other veggie goodies this Saturday, and I hope you find something new to celebrate too!