I am also no vegetarian, but to be fair, vegetarianism is the logical choice.
Meat is an inefficient nutritional delivery device compared to grains and vegetables. Meat is wasteful. If you eat meat, YOU are wasteful. (Incidentally, so am I.)
From a veggie site:
Quote:
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A vegetarian diet can feed significantly more people than a meat-centered diet. More than 840 million people in the world are malnourished, yet over 70 percent of the U.S. grain harvest and 80 percent of its corn harvest is fed to farmed animals.
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I forget the exact numbers, but I think you can feed ten times the people with a vegetarian diet than you can with a meat based diet, given a certain amount of land or the crop harvest that comes from that land.
Growing all that animal feed requires a tremendous amount of fresh water. Fresh water that could be used for humans. It takes 100 times more water to grow a pound of beef than a pound of soybeans.
Growing all that feed wastes fossil fuels. We could significantly reduce our dependence of mideast oil if everyone in the US became a vegetarian.
Too much meat is not terribly healthy for you. Look at the food pyramid. You're not supposed to eat much meat at all, and don't actually need any.
I'm just listing a couple of reasons that come to mind. If you look at the logic behind the meat question. The answer is clearly to be a vegetarian.
The only reason to not become a vegetarian is if you like meat enough that you don't care about that other stuff. It's a purely selfish decision, something Americans are good at.
But again, to be clear, I eat meat as well. I'll be having pork chops for dinner tonight, with couscous and corn on the cob.