Vegetarian Week 2011

The Vegan Lifestyle is on a fast rise in American. Back in January, NPR broadcasted a piece about the trend. Speaking with vegan cookbook authors, the facts remain the same. Living a compassionate life is better for you, animals and the planet over all.

Factory Farm Facts:

• Feeding animals antibiotics on a consistent basis may cause the humans that consume them to lose some of their ability to fight certain strains of bacteria.
• People who live in close proximity to factory farms often complain of high incidents of illness.
• After one or two years of producing eggs at an unnaturally high rate, female fowl are classified as “spent hens.” No longer financially profitable for factory farmers, they are ground up and used as “feed” for the remaining hens.
• The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that confined animals generate three times more raw waste than humans in America.
• The use of fossil fuels in factory farms emits 90 million tons of CO2 every year.
• According to a study done by the Environmental Integrity Project, the air at some factory farm test sites in the U.S. is dirtier than in America’s most polluted cities.
• Salmon are grown in crowded cages installed in the bays and estuaries of the country’s otherwise beautiful southern fjord region of Chili. These “farmed” Atlantic salmon are fed a steady diet of wild fish—perfectly edible for humans, but more profitable when converted into “value-added” finfish. The approximately three pounds of wild fish needed to produce each pound of farmed salmon has caused some people to refer to finfish aquaculture operations as “reverse protein factories.” Equally alarming, salmon farms have become excessively dependent upon toxic pesticides to combat sea lice and antibiotic medicines to thwart viruses that can run rampant among the high concentrations of rapidly growing, penned fish—not unlike industrial-scale hog, poultry, and cattle CAFOs on land.

These are just a few reasons why going vegan is better for human, the earth and animals.

Please take a moment to cruise around the website and see you May 23rd-27th!