Overview

It's critical that we are conscientious about the foods we select to place on our table. Not only do our food choices impact our health and well-being, they have broad ramifications for planetary survival. These implications include disease, hunger, environmental devastation, and ultimately death.

Heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, and other chronic diseases kill 1.4 million Americans annually. Infectious diseases, also referred to as food poisoning, sicken many millions and kill thousands. The former have been associated by a dozen panels of experts with consumption of animal fat and meat. The latter are propagated by E. coli, Salmonella, and other pathogens that thrive primarily on meat, egg, and dairy products.

Hunger afflicts more than 800 million people worldwide and kills 24,000 per day, mostly children. A major factor is the waste of foodstuffs fed to animals raised for food, rather than to starving people. This was first documented in Frances Moore Lappe's 1972 classic Diet For a Small Planet and was reaffirmed at the 2002 World Food Summit in Rome.

Most wars are fought over control of natural resources: land, water, oil, minerals. Yet, animal agriculture is by far the largest user and despoiler of natural resources.

Death is the end result of all these problems. In addition, animal agriculture directly kills annually nearly 50 billion animals worldwide, after subjecting them to the cruelties of factory farming. It also kills uncounted numbers of wildlife on land and in the seas.

Yet, these issues are not even discussed in our nation's schools, nutrition education has been largely relinquished to the very meat and dairy industries that create these problems, and our children are forced to consume the harmful products of these industries. The responsibility for this tragedy must be shared by parents, teachers, food service personnel, school administrators, Congress, USDA, and of course, the meat, egg, and dairy industries.

Common Concerns
Overview | Diet & Health | Diet & Disease
Diet & World Hunger | Diet & The Environment | Diet & Animals