I want to make a new dish for my husband this Saturday.  I'm actually vegan and prefer meals with no dairy or eggs, but I know how to use substitutes.  Oh and no fish meals please, because I don't eat that either. 

Health

Real food for real people. Good for every body. Incredible edible. The "basic four" food groups. And the question almost every vegetarian is most tired of answering: Where do you get your protein?

Let's face it folks, agribusiness is trying to brainwash us all. And they've succeeded! Most women I know are convinced that the best way to prevent osteoporosis is to consume dairy products, but the well-documented fact is quite the opposite. The excess protein contained in meat and dairy products actually prevents calcium absorption by the body and is a significant risk factor for osteoporosis.

That's right, I said excess protein. Most Americans eat too much protein. Most American vegetarians eat 50% more protein than they need. So protein really is not an issue at all. Even Frances Moore Lappe, who popularized the concept of protein complementarity in 1971, has long since admitted that "getting enough protein" is simply not an issue.

So what are the issues? How about heart disease and strokes, which are responsible for a whopping 50% of U.S. deaths. Data from the China Health Project suggests that about 95% of these deaths could be cut by vegetarian diets. Likewise, 80% of breast cancer deaths among women could be prevented. Wanna lower your cholesterol? It's easy; just stop eating animal fat.

"Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet." -- Albert Einstein

"I think in the next ten or twenty years, we'll have evidence [showing that a vegetarian diet is superior] that is as strong as the evidence that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer. In my view, it's plenty strong now." --T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D., director of the China Health Project

To continue the smoking analogy a bit further, I would like to submit that meat-based diets affect everyone in much the same way that second-hand smoke can affect the health of a nonsmoker. This is because of the disastrous effects that the meat industry has on the environment.

Environment

Most people don't think of diet as an environmental issue, but it is! Meat production is incredibly inefficient. By growing grain which is fed to livestock which is fed to humans, you end up with much less food than you would have by feeding grain and other plant products directly to humans. Annually, an acre of land can produce 40,000 pounds of potatoes, 50,000 pounds of tomatoes, or a paltry 250 pounds of beef.

If Americans would reduce meat consumption by just 10%, enough grain would be saved to feed the 60,000,000 people who die of hunger each year. It's a damn shame that people in third-world countries are going hungry while their land is being used to feed meat to rich people in other countries.

The grain used for livestock feed puts a heavy burden on the land and is responsible for most topsoil depletion. Topsoil depletion is a serious problem in today's world, and it's also historically responsible for the demise of many great civilizations. Will we be next?

Hey (I hear you cry), if meat production uses so many resources, why isn't it more expensive? The answer lies in tax subsidies (including water supply) to the agriculture industry. You don't really pay for meat at the grocery store -- we all pay for it when we pay our taxes. (And we pay for it again in the form of medical care for heart disease patients.) It has been estimated that hamburger meat would cost $35 per pound without subsidies.

I could get on a similar soapbox regarding gasoline products, but perhaps it's all the same thing:

"American feed [for livestock] takes so much energy to grow -- counting fuel for farm machinery and for making fertilizers and pesticides -- that it might as well be a petroleum byproduct." --Alan Durning, Worldwatch Institute