This is part 7 of a 10-part series on how changing ones eating habits may be the most accessible and impactful way to improve the world.

In case preventing Earth from becoming another hot potato in the universe isn’t enough motivation to reduce your consumption of meat and animal products, I’m going to serve you some more insight into why these businesses dish out so much environmental havoc.

For the main course, we have #2 Stew – a dish representing runoff from factory farms that harnesses 160 times the pollution strength as raw municipal sewage.

With the sludge entering our waterways at 250,000 pounds per second (American humans produce 12,000 lbs/sec) and completely bypassing sewage treatment facilities, it has caused the E.P.A to declare it a greater polluter to our waterways than all other industrial processes combined. This is easily demonstrated through a 1995 spill of 25 million gallons of hog waste that killed nearly 14 million fish and closed down 364,000 acres of coastal shellfish beds.

In response, many farms have chosen to spray their waste on crops as a “fertilizer” containing concentrated pesticides, antibiotics, growth hormones, heavy metals, parasites, bacteria, viruses, and infectious prions. Adding to this tendency to destroy ecosystems, #2 Stew also administers an enormous nutritional supplement upon entering the ocean, which then supports the growth of toxic algae and/or the more common “dead zone.”

With animal agriculture consuming half of the United States’ water (requiring 2,500 gallons to produce one pound of meat), and emitting 80-percent of the United States’ ammonia (an ingredient that returns to the earth in the form of acid rain), troubled water is clearly served with this meal. Also served are two sides of genetically modified crops, corn and soy (that constitute a large portion of animal feed), a large plate of soil erosion, and huge amounts of wasted land, food, energy, and rainforests.

Upon this meal’s completion, the Earth’s been left with a bad case of indigestion.  Administer your remedy through the incorporation of more vegetarian meals into your life – begin by trying some delicious recipes from vegcooking.com, or finding vegetarian restaurants @ happycow.net.