There is a very persuading article by Stephen Fenwick-Paul over at the ActiVeg website that points out how you can dramatically reduce your environmental footprint by converting to a Vegan diet. Based on calculations done using the Earth Day calculator he makes the following observations:
- The adoption of a vegan diet is far more beneficial for the environment than choosing to follow a local, unprocessed meat-based diet.
- Moving to a vegan diet is similar to saving 25 hours of air travel a year.
- Adopting a vegan diet is far more important than abandoning your car
The basic rule of thumb used for this is that it takes 2kg of feed to produce every kilogram of chicken, 4kg of feed to produce a kilo of pork and at least 7kg of feed to produce a kilo of beef.