It's the news no one wants to hear: giving up meat is probably the single best way to save the planet.  Forget buying a Prius; forget recycling.  For several reasons, vegetarianism is emerging as the number one way to help repair the damage we have done to our planet as a species.

I first encountered this startling fact in a New York Times article in August, 2007.  In November of 2006, "the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization issued a report stating that the livestock business generates more greenhouse gas emissions than all forms of transportation combined."  Many scientific studies have been published since then, confirming the dismaying fact that, as a Humane Society spokesperson said, ""switching to a plant-based diet does more to curb global warming than switching from an S.U.V. to a Camry."

The carbon footprint of the shrinkwrapped meat you buy at the grocery store is fairly shocking.  The animals are transported from farm, to feedlot, to processing plant, to grocery stores.  The grain to feed them is planted by diesel tractors, raised with chemicals that have their own carbon footprint, cut and threshed with more machines, shipped to the mill, ground into grain, then shipped to the feedlot. 

So that's the carbon footprint argument.  Now National Geographic is pointing out another problem with meat: all those animals are eating us out of house and home.

In a special report on their website, National Geographic outlines the slow moving disaster which is overtaking us in the form of higher food prices.  I noticed the price of basic foods last year, when the cost of a loaf of bread priced me right out of the market.  I bought a breadmaker at the thrift store, and never looked back.  It never occurred to me to wonder why the prices were going up.  It turns out the answer is that we're running out of grain:

"For most of the past decade, the world has been consuming more food than it has been producing. After years of drawing down stockpiles, in 2007 the world saw global carryover stocks fall to 61 days of global consumption, the second lowest on record."

Vegetarianism comes into play later in the article, when the author points out that "It takes up to five times more grain to get the equivalent amount of calories from eating pork as from simply eating grain itself-ten times if we're talking about grain-fattened U.S. beef."

It should also be noted that the gold rush for biofuel is a secondary cause of our dwindling food stock.  "Since 2005, the mad rush to biofuels alone has pushed grain-consumption growth from about 20 million tons annually to 50 million tons, according to Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute."  And if biofuel is going to starve us out, I honestly don't know what to tell you.

Nevertheless, the writing is on the wall: it's time that vegetarianism moved from the fringe to the center.  Many countries embrace vegetarianism as the norm, and it's time for us in North America to do the same.  I quietly gave up meat about two months ago, and I have to report that it's really not as bad as you'd think.  I eat a lot of cheese and eggs, which doesn't leave me completely innocent of destroying the planet (those cows and chickens need feed, after all).  But it's definitely a step in the right direction. 

Won't you join me?