Vegetarianism

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than an attempt by those from the less popular animal "rights" movement to ride the coattails of the more popular environmental movement. In some cases, warnings of impending environmental cataclysm are used to advance an ethical agenda. However, arguments to the effect that eating meat is "destroying the planet" overlook that the planet has not yet been destroyed despite millions of years of omnivorous and carnivorous eating by millions of individuals from a multitude of species. The Second Law of Thermodynamics dictates that some energy will be inevitably lost as one moves up the food web. Therefore, arguments about how it takes X pounds of plant protein to generate Y pounds of meat have a sound theoretical basis. However, these arguments are often overstated. These arguments falsely assume that pork chops and steak are the only products of animal agriculture. They falsely presume that a pound of animal foodstuffs is nutritionally and energetically equivalent to a pound of plant ...

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