By Jen Lahey
Troy Lyt Mallett was only 19 when he discovered two things: one, his health was in danger, and two, there was something he could do to fix it. Along with quitting smoking, he began eating a vegetarian diet, and he hasn’t looked back.
“I grew up living on a lot of meat, a meat and potato diet. A lot of bacon, beef, pork and chicken. A very carnivorous diet,” Mallett says.
“My cholesterol was dangerously high for a 19 year old. So it was either I change my eating habits and my smoking habits, or I could risk having a heart attack or coronary disease.”
Health isn’t always the first thing that comes to mind when the word ‘vegetarian’ is uttered. The stereotype is that vegetarians are sickly, skinny Birkenstock-wearing hippies who don’t eat meat because they don’t want to hurt the fuzzy bunnies.
Far from the truth, this stereotype does highlight one of the main reasons people choose to eat vegetarian diets: animal welfare.
But many people also ‘go veg’ for health reasons, like Mallett, and others do so out of concern for the environment.
Like many vegetarians, Mallett started by cutting red meat from his diet.
Then he slowly steered away from all meat products and even cut out dairy products for a period, although he says he now has a soft spot for the occasional piece of cheese.
What started as a health scare is now a lifestyle for Mallett: five years later he’s a chef at the Green Door, a well-known vegetarian restaurant on Main Street in Ottawa.
Like many people, he chose to eat a vegetarian diet for one reason, but says the more he learned about vegetarianism, the more multi-faceted his reasons became.
“Another reason I’m vegetarian is mainly the amount of pesticides and chemicals and hormones and antibiotics that they put into meat, diary, anything animal produced,” he says. “I don’t want to be feeding myself a cornucopia of different chemicals that I don’t know what they’re doing to me, or what they did to the animal they were injected into,” Mallett says.
It’s an oft-touted reason to go veggie: vegetarians ingest fewer pesticides and other harmful chemicals than their meat-eating counterparts.
The further up on the food chain you eat, the more chemicals you ingest, says Dave Steele, vice-president of the pro-vegetarian group EarthSave Canada.
Because animals eat enormous amounts of pesticide-laden grain, more of the harmful chemicals get into their systems, where they are further concentrated in their fat.
“If a cow eats 10 times more vegetables or grain products, then the chemicals are 10 times more concentrated in their flesh, and particularly their fat,” Steele says. “Eating lower on the food chain means you get less poisons, it’s that simple.”
Steele also points out that studies have shown that vegetarians have a lower risk many life-threatening illnesses. According to the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a U.S.-based organization that advocates the health benefits of a vegetarian diet, numerous independent studies have shown that such diets reduce the risk of numerous cancers and heart disease.
Steele also says that many people decide to adopt a vegetarian lifestyle because they don’t want to support the meat and dairy industries, which he says are cruel to animals.
Most factory-farmed chickens live in a space equivalent to a sheet of paper, often subject to having their beaks cut off without anesthesia, live their lives in virtual darkness and often foot-deep in their own feces.
Once people realize that, they often don’t like chicken as much as they did before, Steele says.
Deedee Sanderson, 30, is just that sort of vegetarian. She began eating an organic vegetarian diet because she says she became ill from chemicals and antibiotics in meat and dairy products.
But Sanderson says the way animals are treated in factory farming is enough to keep her away from meat, although she sometimes eats organic meat.
“If I could raise my own chickens I would, and I’d eat them, so it isn’t necessarily a matter of killing creatures, it’s about the industry and the way they’re grown,” Sanderson says.
She thinks the overcrowded conditions that chickens live in are disgusting.
However, there is a distinction to be made within the chicken industry as far as treatment of the animals goes. Chickens raised for meat in Canada live in free-run barns, says Lisa Bishop, a spokesperson for the Chicken Farmers of Canada. Chickens that are raised for eggs are housed in cages, she says.
In addition to the health benefits and animal cruelty issues, many vegetarians have a third set of reasons for cutting animal products from their diets: concern for the environment.
Mallett says he feels good about his vegetarian lifestyle because it’s an everyday way to show his commitment to his environmental ideals. By eating vegetarian foods, he says he is using fewer resources.
The amount of water needed to raise one pound of beef is a staggering 2,500 to 5,000 gallons, according to EarthSave International. That water is used in the grain production process.
According to Steele, it takes an average of 12 pounds of grain to raise a single pound of beef, making it one of the most inefficient products to grow.
“That means 12 times more fields are needed to grow cattle, many more pesticides are being used, and at least 11 of that 12 pounds of grain is converted into manure,” Steele says.
Manure production is another contentious beef farming issue. Critics remember the Walkerton, Ont., tragedy several years ago, where several people died and thousands became ill when the water supply became tainted by bacteria from manure.
Cows also produce large amounts of methane gas, which may contribute to climate change, Steele says.
The environmental impacts of beef production are not only local. Because of North American demand for beef, more and more farmers in Central and South America are raising cattle to make their living.
Currently, that livelihood is one of the main causes of rainforest destruction, since farmers clear cut the vegetation to make room to graze their cattle, according to the Rainforest Action Network. For every quarter pound of beef that comes from a cleared rainforest site, 55 square feet of rainforest is destroyed.
“Our indulgence in meat comes at a cost not only to our health, but at a cost to populations around the world and their environment,” Sanderson says.
With so many reasons beyond simple concern for animal welfare, why don’t more people turn to a vegetarian lifestyle? Mallet thinks it’s because there are still misconceptions about the skills needed to go veggie.
“There is this whole stigma that it’s very difficult to learn to cook vegetarian. But over the course of the years I have been preparing food, I have found [vegetarian cooking] much easier. You don’t have to worry about cooking chicken properly so it doesn’t poison you. It’s just incredibly simple. You just have to pick up a book and read about it. All the information’s out there.”