Why vegan?
for the animals, for the environment and for health!Ethics
The manufacture of all animal products inevitably causes animal suffering, be it through the forced fertilization of animals in order to breed further offspring, be it through tight and unsanitary conditions in mass farming, or ultimately in the slaughterhouse. Animals want to live in freedom and dignity, with their family and friends, just like us. They do not want to be viewed as property and exploited by us. They do not want to find a premature and cruel death in the slaughterhouse.
Last but not least, people also suffer from the animal industry, for example as poorly paid slaughterhouse employees who have no other opportunity to earn a living and therefore have to do the ungrateful, cruel and mentally destructive work of killing animals for our consumption. In addition, a significant proportion of the global grain harvest is fed to animals while hundreds of millions of people are starving.
In today’s society, where we have safe and incredibly diverse food production, we no longer have to rely on exploiting animals in order to survive. We can completely cover our nutritional needs with a balanced plant-based diet. Thanks to the latest culinary innovations, we can also experience the same dishes and flavors as before, simply made from plants. We are therefore convinced that a vegan lifestyle is the right one from an animal ethical point of view.
Environmental protection
The production of animal food is very inefficient, both due to the need for feed and the use of space. Depending on the animal species, 4 to 12 calories of plant-based food must be fed for one calorie of meat. Therefore, far more arable land and water are used per person for an omnivorous diet than for a vegan diet. Although animal food production takes up around 70% of the global arable land, it only provides around 20% of the calories consumed globally. Most of the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest is done for animal agriculture: In addition to creating pastures, soy is grown there, and this is mainly used for the production of animal feed and not for human consumption. Last but not least, methane emissions from cows, for example, are problematic because methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas. The animal industry causes about as many greenhouse gas emissions as all traffic – that is, as much as all cars, trucks, trains, ships and planes combined.
Health
A purely plant-based diet is now possible without any problems. Renowned nutrition institutes such as the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (formerly the American Dietetic Association) state that a well-planned vegetarian or vegan lifestyle is possible at any stage of development and can even bring health benefits. A vegan diet has been shown to reduce the risk of several types of diseases that are more prevalent in western industrialized nations, including heart disease, obesity, diabetes and various types of cancer.