Veganist: Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World (21 page)

Demographic statistics are helpful in understanding the potential for change, but it’s important not to forget that no matter how big a social phenomenon gets, change happens one person at a time. Take someone like Jack. A few years after finishing his law degree, Jack was at a dinner party with friends of friends. His hosts were in a “mixed marriage,” an omnivore and a vegan, and the conversation went to food and problems in factory farming. Jack didn’t have much to say (his hosts never knew the chain of events they initiated) but when he got home that evening he put three words into his Internet browser search field:
factory
,
farming
, and
video
.

It didn’t take long for Jack to realize he didn’t want to support what the meat industry had become. It was a gut response for Jack. The suffering he saw made him terribly uncomfortable, and he made a resolution: tomorrow I will eat no animal products. Soon it was a week animal-product-free, then a month. By the end of his vegan month Jack was not only feeling more energetic but was feeling like his life, his choices, had a new meaning.

Co-workers began complimenting him on his having lost weight. Jack’s recurrent problem with back pain, which had been getting worse for years, stopped for good. The biggest fan of his new diet was his new girlfriend, Melissa. Vegan diets tend to promote better circulation, which is likely why Jack’s back pain subsided, but as Dr. Ornish explained in Promise 3, the benefits of greater circulation don’t stop there.

Fast-forward a few years: Melissa and Jack are married, and their vegan cooking has earned them a reputation as excellent hosts. Jack and Melissa had always been well-liked people in their community and decided to have a dinner party of their own one night, all vegan. It was the first of many. One friend confessed to Jack that the first time Jack invited him over for dinner, he made a point of grabbing a burger before arriving (
not
a veggie burger). That same friend is now a committed Meatless Mondays man and makes sure to eat a light lunch if he’ll be eating dinner at Jack and Melissa’s. “If I could have vegan food like this every day,” guests would invariably report, “it would be easy to go vegan.”

Jack never preached. He just dished up the best food he could and shared his story and knowledge when others asked.

Five years after Jack went vegan, a handful of people in his social circle had joined him in adopting a plant-based diet. Most people he knew didn’t make a complete switch, but virtually everyone in his social circle had acquired a new perspective on food. Just by knowing a vegan couple for a few years, the idea of a totally animal-free diet had come to seem natural to them. One couple he knew had learned from him that the seventh edition of Dr. Benjamin Spock’s
Baby and Child Care
urged parents to feed their children a completely vegan diet. The couple hadn’t been willing to change their own diet, but it felt wrong to them to pass on what they knew was a bad, addictive habit. By the time their son Jonathan was three, the whole family was vegan (admittedly Mom and Dad were pretty sloppy about it when Jonathan wasn’t involved).

Let’s imagine the possibilities of what might happen from here. Fast-forward another twenty-five years. Baby Jonathan is now completing a degree in public health, graduating with honors with the class of 2035. In 2050 Jonathan is appointed to a presidential commission to develop new government recommendations on diet. Jonathan has no idea where the knowledge originated, but, as a vegan, he grew up knowing that he couldn’t rely on U.S. government recommendations for diet because of the undue influence of factory farm corporations.

Sadly, the present structure of agribusiness still makes some of the most unhealthy food the most profitable to produce, exerting a corrupting influence on industry. Jonathan is hardly the most important person in shaping the presidential commission’s recommendations (or the tenth most), but he does spearhead a successful effort to ensure that the next group of medical experts who will develop new government guidelines will be free of industry influence. It seems like a small thing, but looking back historians argue that the government guidelines produced in 2050 were the first to be viewed as scientifically credible by nutritional experts. The guidelines certainly made the health benefits of a plant-based diet clear to anyone who paid attention and, in the ensuing years, the percentage of people in the nation who went meatless hit a critical mass. The Western diet that had prevailed at the turn of the twenty-first century was soon regarded as a lesson in how food systems can go wrong.

Time travel being impossible, I’m sure you’ve surmised that Jack isn’t a real person like the others whose stories I’ve told in this book, but everything I’ve said about his story is true of more than one person I have known. And what couldn’t be more real is the enormous influence we have on how other people eat—influences that can work in unexpected ways. Think about how your favorite foods became your favorite foods. Did you just find them on your own through vigorous taste-testing of whatever food you happen to see? Or were you introduced to the foods by other people?

What’s also true about this story is that seeing a dramatic change in how a nation eats in one person’s lifetime is eminently possible. This is a point that the food and farming advocacy group Farm Forward suggests we should keep in the forefront of our minds. “It is easy to forget,” they point out,

If dietary change seems hard, it’s good to remember this history. As Farm Forward lays out, in modern times changing diets are the rule rather than the exception. And all of us can raise our voices about the shape of the future simply by changing how we raise our forks.

You can’t know how your choices will ripple out into the world, but when it comes to food you can be sure the ripple effect is multiplying the impact of your choices. Even more, you can know that you are alive at a moment when change isn’t just desirable, but necessary.

We are not only at a tipping point but also at a critical turning point. Beyond reaffirming that animal agriculture is the chief contributor of greenhouse gases, the latest United Nations report on climate change concludes that there is simply no other way to prevent the potentially catastrophic impacts of climate change other than for the world to move in the direction of plant-based diets. The report explains, “A substantial reduction of impacts would only be possible with a substantial worldwide diet change.” This means that the choices we make today will be decisive ones in shaping the future. It means our choices matter.

Imagine

The possibility for change is immense. Consider the case of soy foods, which virtually always replace animal products in American diets. In 1992 the FDA made it legal for soy producers to indicate the link between consuming their product and reduction in heart disease risk. This modest move by the government and changing consumer demands led U.S. sales for soy foods to multiply by fourteen-fold in the next sixteen years—from $300 million to more than $4 billion. Soy milk, a relatively obscure beverage when I was born, is now present in more than one in ten American households, and some industry executives are expecting that number to triple in coming decades. The point is not that soy-based meat and dairy alternatives are the only or best ones but simply that there is enormous potential for positive change.

Imagine what’s possible. As more and more people choose veganism, economies of scale will further lower costs and increase the variety and quality of meat and dairy alternatives. A cycle will follow in which food innovations and the increasing number of people going vegan will mutually reinforce each other. Soon that long row of animal flesh at the back of the grocery store will be occupied by varieties of tofu, tempeh, seitan, and other meat alternatives. Entire new industries will be created: new micro “dairies” will produce regional faux cheeses; demand for a more diverse variety of fruits and vegetables will drive new, more sustainable, and fairer trade agreements between nations; free from the stench and pathogens that surround meat production, a new generation of farmers will produce their crops in closer proximity to their neighbors.

People’s quality of life and length of life will increase. Health insurance companies will start to give deep discounts to those who avoid meat and dairy and health-care costs will plummet, driving growth in businesses of all sizes. Animal agriculture will no longer have the political power to pollute waterways with near impunity. Deforestation will begin to reverse as less land is needed. Climate change will slow. Headlines once filled with news of emerging super-pathogens and oil spills will be replaced with reports on the decreasing number of foodborne illnesses and reduced reliance on fossil fuel. As people see the changes their generation helped create, a sense of empowerment will replace frustration. Healthier, safer, more ecologically balanced, and more inspired, future generations will take on new challenges with a confidence. We will learn to more fully realize our human potential.

If Only a Small Percentage…

Even if only a modest percentage of people move in the direction of a vegan diet, it will be a game changer. Consider the health-care costs directly attributable to meat. As we saw in Promise 5, the health-care costs of heart disease alone, which can be almost entirely eliminated through plant-based diets, are $500 billion annually. Even if the costs of this one disease were reduced by 30 percent it would amount to $150 billion dollars! What can you do with $150 billion that you are no longer spending on hospital bills? According to a report prepared by the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, a $150 billion investment in green infrastructure would create 1.7 million green jobs. That’s just one possibility, though.

Every American who switches from a typical U.S. diet to a vegan one has an extraordinary impact. They reduce their consumption of fossil fuels by more than 80 percent, cutting their carbon emissions by 3,000 pounds annually. According to a University of Chicago study, if Americans reduced their meat consumption by only 20 percent it would be as if everyone in the nation switched from a standard sedan to an ultra-efficient hybrid. By going vegetarian you will save three acres of land, save 2,700 pounds of soil from erosion, and save 95,000 gallons of water every year, year after year.

Even if we Americans reduced our meat consumption by only 5 percent (eating approximately one fewer meat dish a week), that would free up 7.5 million tons of grain, enough to feed the 25 million Americans who go hungry each day. And as we saw in Promise 7, if 10 percent of the world population gave up meat, it would be enough to feed the estimated billion people who go hungry annually. Tipping point or no, how we respond to our cravings for meat will have a global force.

Of course, for the animals who suffer on today’s factory farms we don’t need to calculate complex statistics to imagine how much our dietary choices matter. Even a single individual going vegan saves the lives of about 28 chickens and turkeys and 240 sea animals annually. If over time your influence ripples out to a thousand people and they too go veg, their diet will collectively save an additional 140 cows and 400 pigs
every year
. According to the Humane Society of the United States, if every American reduced his or her meat consumption by just 10 percent that would be enough to save roughly 1 billion animals from miserable lives annually. If that 10 percent reduction was maintained, in a bit more than a century more animal lives would be saved than the total number of human beings who have ever walked the earth.

When we poll vegetarians and ask why they have chosen their diet, animal welfare concerns are the most commonly given response—about 54 percent of people give this reason (almost the same, 53 percent, cite health). For me animal suffering is one of the most compelling reasons to go vegan, but for others it is the least important. I recently had lunch with a well-known human rights activist. She had heard I was a human rights advocate, too, and I explained that I am, but I’m actually better known as an animal protection advocate. She looked dejected. The expression on her face said silently what she soon asked me. How can I care so much about animals when so many humans are suffering? How can I spend my time advocating vegetarianism when I could be speaking about the great issues of human rights? I understood. But I also wondered:
Why do so many smart and caring people seem to think that compassion is a competition?
As if caring about suffering anywhere, in any form, weren’t a natural part of being a caring person! As if good deeds didn’t lead to more good deeds! And if we can’t get the little things right, how can we stand a chance at getting the really big things right?