Dietary Habits In America Essay

World hunger, pollution, soil depletion, species extinction, and disease all have one common factor, a culprit who has left its smudgy fingerprints on so many aspects of society today. It is said that " the US food production system uses about 50% of the total U.S. land area, approximately 80% of the freshwater, and 17% of the fossil energy used in the country.(Pimentel and Pimentel,2003)" That has only increased since the population continuously and exponentially keeps growing. Animals must be fed, then their meat must be cut, processed, and packed or kept alive for dairy, which only serves to deplete more of the resources needed elsewhere in America. This current method of dietary habits in America specifically is creating huge burdens on

land area; Much of it serving as feed farms where hundreds of thousands of acres are used to grow soy and grain for livestock feed rather than for crops that yeild a much larger amount of food. America is one of the 59 countries worldwide that experiences both cases of malnutrition as well as cases of obesity. A vegan diet ideally supports the idea that the same acreage used for feed to be used instead to grow enough food to have plenty of excess. "Quantifying the environmental impacts of the various livestock categories, mostly arising from feed production, is this a grand challenge of sustainability science.(Colin,2015)" Adopting a balanced plant based diet not only provides the body with all necessary proteins, vitamins and healthy fats but it also reduces the methane emissions and greenhouse gases significantly by not eating meat that has been fed by these mega crops. Since so many fruits and vegetables can be grown in small spaces, the output of food per person becomes much greater than that of meat and dairy production. A plant-based lifestyle positively affects the environment and the human body but it can also help people in the individual communities around the