“Vegetarian food leaves deep impression on our nature. If the whole world adopts vegetarianism, it can change the destiny of mankind” – Albert Einstein


Removing meat from our diet would bring benefits for both our health as well as in the terms of the world’s well being. However, just like anything else, this would have disadvantages too.

Everyone chooses to become a vegetarian because of different reasons. Some people simply have some health problems and cannot eat meat, some of them simply do not like the taste of it. But there are also people who choose it as an ideology; putting effort to bring awareness about the harmful causes of meat consumption in terms of nature, climate change and global warming. The debate about the vegetarianism –whether it is something beneficial or does not have any influence on humankind and environment – has been unprecedented and still is in progress. In this article, we are going to focus on the both benefits as well as harmful causes of vegetarianism, in terms of what would happen if everyone on earth would become vegetarian one day:

In developed countries, vegetarianism would bring many benefits to the environment and to the health of the society, however, for some countries, this would have negative consequences as well as this would cause poverty for them. There are many farmers and other people raising animals and that this has become their job. If everyone on earth would become vegetarian they would be out of work. Therewithal, fisherman also would be out of work.

Global Warming: The meat industry is one of the top contributors to climate change. The methane gas farm animals release in one of the biggest causes of global warming. Namely, if all the people on the earth would stop meat consumption, the climate change would slow down, the greenhouse gas emissions would be decreased. At the same time, keep in mind that there is no doubt that the plant mass of the earth is beyond capable of providing us adequate nutrition and that they would more than cover all of our needs.

Animal extinction: It has been known that meat-eaters speed worldwide species extinction and the livestock production is one of the major causes of animal extinction. If everyone would stop eating meat and instead decided to become vegetarian, this extinction would greatly slow down.

Water: Did you know that in order to produce 1 kg meat, 100 thousand liters of water is being wasted? This number of water use associated with raising animals equals to a person’s waste of water while showering for 2 years. Imagine how many meat kilograms is being produced just while you are reading this, and think about the waste of the water in meat industries. If everyone on earth went vegetarian, we would use less water and the climate change, global warming, waste of water problems could disappear.

Global Economy:  Most famous food restaurants involving meat consumption such as MacDonalds, Burger King, Denny’s, Kfc would probably be closed after such a change and this would cause negative consequences to the world economy. If the meat industry would disappear, approximately 6.2 million people would be unemployed only in the US  and this number would be much larger for the rest of the world.

Farmland: If everyone on earth would suddenly stop eating meat, there would be no enough plants for nutrition for everybody. This means more growing of plants will be required, which consequently there must be more farmland places available. For this reason, many forests would be destroyed in order to have enough farmland areas for growing plants; that this situation again will lead us to global warming.

Loss of cultural identity: In many societies, meat takes an important place in culture. Removing meat from our everyday diet would have many cultural influences. At the same time, we can say that one of the biggest reasons why people cannot leave eating meat is because of their tradition, cultural identity and cultural shaping. In many cultures, eating meat has become a part of the individual’s identity. If suddenly everyone would go vegetarian, there would be no Christmas turkey’s or no Eid celebrations and this would lead to losing of individual’s cultural identity.

Copyright: Dream Humanity