Numbers and Facts, For Everyone

Excerpt from Student's Vegetarian Cookbook by Carole Raymond C1997

Livestock consumes 70% of US grain production. Twenty million people die each year as a result of malnutrition and starvation. American s could feed 100,000,000 people by reducing their intake of meat by just 10%
One acre of prime land can produce many pounds of edible product. Here are a few examples:
30,000 pounds of apples
40,000 pounds of potatoes
50,000 pounds of tomatoes
250 pounds of beef
Livestock-cattle poultry, goats, sheep-totaling 15 billion worldwide now outnumber people three to one. Livestock graze on half of the world’s land mass. The explosion of livestock populations has resulted in a parallel explosion of animal wastes that pollute surface and ground waste. US livestock produces 230,000 pounds of excrement per second. The amount of waste created by a 10,000-head feed lot is equal to the waste of a city of 110,000 people.
World livestock production is now a significant factor in the emission of two of the four global warming gasses: carbon dioxide and methane. Every steak we eat has the same effect as a 25 mile drive in a typical American car.
Each year, an estimated 125,000 square miles of rain forest are permanently destroyed, bringing about the extinction of approximately 1,000 plant and animal species.
Producing one pound of feedlot steak results in the loss of 35 pounds of topsoil. It takes 200 to 1,000 years to form on inch of topsoil.
It takes 2,500 gallons of water to produce 1 edible pound of beef. It takes 49 gallons of water to produce 1 edible pound of apples.
Eighty percent of the meat produced in the United States contains drugs that are passed on to you when you eat meat.
Animal products contain large quantities of saturated fat, cholesterol, and have no dietary fiber. The US Surgeon General has stated that 6-% of all diseases are diet related. A diet rich in fruits vegetables, and grains (and free from animal products) can prevent, improve, and sometimes cure breast cancer, osteoporosis, prostate cancer, impotence, and obesity.
Seventy-five percent of federal poultry inspectors say that they would not eat chicken.