What Will Happen If We All Went Vegan
🧶 Tags - #Vegan_Blog
The idea of the world going vegan might sound absurd to many, but in recent years there has been a huge growth in the vegan industry and this is due to the number of people going vegan.
You can see the growing interest in veganism all around the world. With new companies as well as old companies launching vegan products every other week. The explosion of vegan burgers to dairy-free milk in almost all supermarkets shows just how impactful this movement is.
Now let’s consider how much of an impact it would make if everyone in the world went vegan?
Environmental Impact
Many people adopt a vegan diet due to environmental causes but, we don’t usually calculate just how much of an impact it would be if every human on earth went vegan. Now we do have some understanding of the consequences of what might happen if everyone did go vegan.
According to a study from PNAS, If we all went vegan the world’s food-related emissions would drop by 70% by 2050. That would be comparable to the levels in the early 2000s.
The UN says that farmed animals are responsible for 14.5% of all man made greenhouse gas emissions. To put it in better perspective this is roughly equivalent to the exhaust emissions of every car, train, ship, aircraft on the planet.
Cutting down carbon emissions would only be the tip of the iceberg. We can see much positive change if this happens.
Half of the world’s habitable land is used for animal agriculture. When we stop abusing animals most of this land can either be converted back to forest or we can use it to grow a variety of crops. Instead of planting mono-crops like soybean or corn, Which is used as animal feed, we can grow plants and vegetables that can fulfill all our nutrient needs.
Impact On Animals
For sure this will be the best thing for the animals. The animal holocaust will be over. No more breeding them into existence just to kill them for taste pleasure.
That would mean we’ll stop breeding around 77 billion land animals that end up in slaughterhouses. The impact on sea animals would be enormous too, we kill more than a trillion sea animals each year. This kind of overfishing will cause the oceans to be almost fishless by 2048. By going vegan the balance in the ocean will soon be restored.
Now if you’re wondering what will happen to the existing animals? We can release many of them in the wild. Animals like pigs, cows, sheep can be left in the wild, while some animals like chickens who are so far removed from their ancestors that they can’t survive in the wild would have to be taken care of. This can be done in wildlife sanctuaries etc.
Although this whole blog is hypothetical, let’s look at this more realistically for a second. We know in reality the world won’t go vegan overnight so this scenario won’t possibly happen. What’s more likely to happen is more and more people going vegan over time.
Especially, as better meat alternatives hit the market that provides everything that meat, right down to the perfect taste without any negatives. This is when we might see a huge shift in the market as eating meat would become irrelevant.
The Change In People’s Lives
In the above point we discussed the effects on animals but, now what about humans, just how much better would our lives get?
Now is the best time to understand that not every vegan food is necessarily nutritious. You can be stuffing yourself with junk food every day and still have similar health issues as meat-eaters, I.e, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, etc.
What’s important is to eat healthy plant-based vegan foods. Now, we aren’t using most of our usable land for growing corn and soybeans for animals. We can grow a variety of healthy vegetables of all kinds such as beans, lentils, leafy greens, legumes, nuts, seeds, etc.
We can end world hunger by going vegan!
Don’t believe me? Let me explain…
We currently grow food that can feed 10 billion people nutritiously but, what are we growing instead? You guessed it! Corn and soybean for making animal feed.
Did you know that an average meat-eater’s diet requires 17 times more land, 14 times more water, and 10 times more energy than a vegetarian diet? Now imagine using all this land, water, and energy to grow crops and vegetables that can be used to feed the poor people of every country. We can make hunger history.
- On a side note, I think eventually in the future the world will go vegan and the people will look back this time and think how we not only let our fellow humans die of hunger but also committed these horrifying acts towards animals.
Now if we think realistically this shift will be slow, giving enough time for people in animal agriculture to tone down the number of animals they breed and to move to a different industry. Most likely plant agriculture! So we won’t be having a problem with animals running around everywhere. So don’t worry that cows will take over the world if we let them all free.
Changed Businesses
Animal Agriculture
Without animal agriculture, there won’t be anyone breeding animals so definitely the animal agriculture industry will shut down for good. This industry will most likely be turned to plant-agriculture or plant-related agriculture like producing compost, etc.
The slaughterhouses will also go away and most likely become plant processing facilities. Especially with all the crops and vegetables, we’d be growing.
More Vegan Options
Many businesses would change their menus, from restaurants to fast food joints everywhere there will be new varieties of [plant-based awesomeness. We will also see many new vegan meat alternatives, in every corner of the world. So the vegan industry would grow many folds as this happens.
Cultural shock
There would be a huge cultural shock as many cultures and religions identify with meat-eating. But here’s a thing we need to understand. Every culture is evolving and changing with time. We might not realize this as we only see the culture in the limited time we have on this planet. So should these cultures and traditions be worried about evolving and changing? I don’t think so, If you have the opportunity to become a better more compassionate human being you should grab it with both hands.