Doing without meat: vegetarians

pure vegetarians or 'vegans'	Some people choose to eat only fruit, vegetables and other plant foods like nuts, cereals, peas and beans. They don't eat any type of animal food: no meat, fish, eggs, milk, yogurt and so on.They usually choose to avoid all animal foods because they don't like the way animals are treated and don't like the idea of eating bits of their dead bodies.
vegetarians	like vegans except that vegetarians may eat dairy products like cheese and milk (lacto-vegetarians) and may also eat eggs (lacto-ovo-vegetarians). Like vegans, they may choose their diet because of worries about killing animals to eat. But unlike vegans, they indirectly support the meat industry they maybe disapprove of, usually without realising it. Why? Take cheese, for example. To make cheese you need milk. To make milk, a cow must have a calf first. The calf is then taken away and fattened for slaughter (if a bull calf). And when the cow has reached the end of her 'useful' life, she too will be killed and made into various food products. Her skin may be made into shoes. Some people even claim to be 'vegetarian' when they eat fish and chicken.
carnivores and omnivores	Being a penguin, I am a fish-eater and I cannot live without my fish. I have no choice, just as a lion cannot live without killing antelopes and eating their meat. Penguins and lions are carnivores (meat-eaters). Humans are really omnivores which means they can live off either plant or animal food, or both. Some humans like the Inuit of the Arctic eat almost nothing but animals because they have no choice. Other people, like those of the Hunza valley in Pakistan, eat almost nothing but plant food for similar reasons. So humans have a big advantage. They can live off almost any foods: vegetable, animal or mixes of both. And anyone who tells you humans can't live without eating animals (as some do) is wrong.

Recently, people in richer countries have turned more and more to animal-based foods.There are problems with this:

• eating a lot of animal food (rich in certain types of 'bad' fats) is now known to be bad for health in later life (see Food pyramid)
• producing cheap meat unfortunately in many cases means animals are treated badly
• animals kept for meat (mainly cattle and hogs, but also including animals like fish and prawns which live in water) consume, in their short lives, enormous amounts of food and water. If the food - mostly cereals, beans and sea fish - was eaten by people directly, it could feed

  To find out more about genes - what they are and how they work - visit my guide to genetic engineering. You can find out about bacteria here too. To see another popup on the damage farming does, click here)

  around ten times more people than eating the animals would
• animals get fed antibiotic growth-promoters to make them grow faster. Scientists have warned that this is making many antibiotics (which humans need to treat dangerous diseases) useless. A recent report from the USA shows that antibiotic resistance genes are getting into bacteria in the soil and water underneath hog-rearing factories [1]
• factory farms make enormous quantities of waste
• more and more land is going to be needed if more people want more meat

1. New Scientist, 24/4/01, page 4.