Vegetarianism: Change Your Plate, Change the World!

            Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, DaVinci, Einstein, Gandhi, and Franklin, some of the most intelligent and intellectual men of history. Ahead of their time, they have given back to the world with genius philosophies and inventions. Though their similarities are not limited to their greatness, they all were a part of a humane revolution. These influential men were all vegetarians. Vegetarianism has been around since ancient Roman times and is gaining popularity among the modern world . There are about fifteen million meatless Americans, and they changed their eating habits to make change . Vegetarianism is the single most effective way for an individual to stop the cruelty of animals, support a sustainable environment, and live a healthy lifestyle.

            Most people associate vegetarians with an animal loving personality. For some, but not all, this is the main reason people go meatless. Vegetarian opposers view animal cruelty in the meat industry as over dramatized by vegetarians or inexistent. The truth is, Americans today are blind to what really goes on behind the meat industry doors. With an increase in population, and a decrease in food price, livestock agriculture has become driven by greed instead of morals and ethics. The disturbing animal cruelty starts off with the ‘meats’ meal. Cows, Poultry, and Hogs are now all fed a single food diet: corn. No more grass, flowers, fruit blooms, or tasty scraps, major meat companies feed their livestock dried genetically manipulated corn kernels because of its cheap price . A constant diet of a single food does not give animals the proper nutrition they need to survive. This causes the cows, chickens, and pigs to have much lower immune systems and can easily contract extremely harmful diseases their body can never fight off . If the animal is still too small to slaughter for food at their time of illness, the meat companies will inject them with extremely powerful overused antibiotics to keep them living long enough to grow more muscle and fat so they can get as much meat as possible from their carcass. These are the lucky ones though. Because for those animals that are able to still gain meat mass even if they are sick with cancer, open wounds, painful illnesses, are never given medical treatment, because by law, an animal is allowed to have their fats and muscles used for meat regardless of medical condition as long as they can stay ‘alive’ until slaughter time. This means Big Macs have a very good possibility of being from the meat of a cow that had a bacterial infection from a cut where the chains hold him down and brain cancer.