As I begin to write this there are 7,459,731,016 people on earth, it is 15:07 on a Tuesday and already today 247,043 new individuals have entered the world, while 103,455 have left it. In a world where “extreme poverty is defined as living with an income of less than 1.90$ per day”, 798,191,218 people live their daily lives surviving on an amount that most of us wouldn’t even remember we had if we lost it.
“Feed the world” is a statement deemed by many to be impossible, when in reality it is only really improbable. Why is it improbable? Because we’re not using the resources we’ve been given efficiently.
The earth is 510,100,000 km2; admittedly 71% of that is covered by water, but by my calculations that still leaves about 147,929,000km2, which is a whole lot of space. So, how are we using all of this space? 45% of it is covered by livestock. Seems a bit silly really.
Now I’m fully aware that throwing around numerical estimates (a) annoys people and (b) doesn’t mean very much, so in short what I’m trying to get across is that everyone has their own battles to fight; in 2016 hunger should not be one of them. Our planet is a beautiful and plentiful place, we’re just not using it right. At present, we are breeding animals, to feed them, to kill them, to eat them and there are still people who go hungry. Is it possible that we’ve added a few too many steps to the process? Worldwide, we are growing enough food to feed 10 billion people and still we have people hungry, because we’re feeding most of it to livestock when we should be feeding it to ourselves. But, wait, that would mean eating plants, and why would anyone want to do that?
So, plant-based vegan lifestyles. There’s a lot of scepticism that surrounds a plant-based vegan diet; is it actually healthy? But humans are carnivores? Seriously though, where do you get your protein? However, I’m going to leave those questions for another time. All you need to know is I’ve been eating this way for a while now and I haven’t died yet, and being a vegan basically makes you a unicorn – people are always talking about you, probably because you’re a massive legend.
Why am I eating so many plants? Well, there’s lots of reasons. 1,100 gallons of water. 45lbs of grain. 30 sqft of forested land. 20lbs CO2 equivalent. One animal’s life. I save all that in one day. And it doesn’t hurt that I feel pretty awesome too. Adopting a plant-based vegan lifestyle is not only good for you, it’s good for the planet, it’s good for the animals and it also will make considerable headway in feeding the world.
I’m not expecting everyone to start walking around bare foot, only eating fruit that falls from trees and hugging the nearest cow (by all means if that is what you want to do feel free) but what I’m trying to say is be a little more conscious. Maybe try going meat-free one day a week, or try and cut down on dairy, or even give a plant-based diet a go. Unicorns only eat plants anyway.