Here's My Beef2 min read

In a world with an ever-increasing population of over seven billion people, we cannot afford to waste resources. Yet, the world’s cattle consume enough food to satisfy 8.7 billion people every year. While people are dying of malnourishment and starvation, animals are being bred and force-fed for their eventual slaughter.
Everyone knows the saying, “reduce, reuse, recycle.” Sustainability, however, extends far beyond these three words. Sure, you can reduce the amount of water being used while brushing your teeth, but when it takes thousands of gallons of water to produce one pound of beef, those thirty seconds without the faucet running aren’t really going to make much of a difference. It is about allocation of resources. Over 50% of greenhouse gas emissions are caused by the meat industry, meaning eliminating beef consumption would be significantly better for the environment than clearing the roads of cars.
It is a vicious cycle – we use absurd amounts of water growing animal feed, which ends up leaching into groundwater as manure, making even less clean water available to use. Single factory farms can produce the same amount of sewage as an entire city.
It’s basic science. Through every step in the food chain, 90% of energy is lost as heat. Therefore, 90% of the calories and nutrients used to raise the animals are lost before they reach the end consumers, the human population. Yet, more than one third of the global supply of grain is used to feed livestock.
In addition to the environment, the meat industry and the heavy amounts of hormones used are detrimental to human health. Due to the filthy conditions under which these animals are placed, farmers use excessive amounts of antibiotics to sustain livestock until they are killed. Research shows that this overuse produces antibiotic-resistant bacteria that pose a huge threat for human illness and disease.
Not to mention the cruelty factor. Maybe it was reasonable back in the day of hunter-gatherers, when our tools were limited and it was an (almost) equal playing ground. But who decided that we have the right to take control over every other species? I won’t go into the gory details of how live animals have their limbs chopped off or are placed into boiling water, but type “factory farming” into any search engine and you’re sure to find numerous videos of the terror. We as a species tend to forget that we are merely a step in the evolutionary process, and we are in no position to torture earth’s other inhabitants. While they may have less complex brain structures, no living organism deserves to have its entire existence manipulated for the benefit of others. Why do we set ourselves apart from the rest of the biological world? This mindset is the reason our resources are diminishing at such rapid rates – because we fail to acknowledge the fact that we are sharing a living space with trillions of other creatures, without whom we would cease to exist.