My little sister asked me today why I was vegan...

My little sister asked me today why I was a vegan. Although she has sat through countless meals of my vegan rants and raves, she was unable to parrot back to me why I believe the world should be vegan.

I asked her why she thought I was vegan and she had a grasp on the concept that we could be directly eating the food that the animals we slaughter eat, thereby cutting out the "middle man" and saving resources. But she could not recall the gut reason of why I am a vegan--

By eating meat, you perpetuate world hunger.

This is how I explained it to my 11-year-old little sis:
It takes an acre of land to raise a cow for slaughter, and once it is slaughtered and prepared, a cow can feed 10 people. But if the farmer were to farm the land with agriculture instead of grass and cow feed, crops grown on an acre could feed 100 people. So by raising agriculture instead of animals, we could feed 10x the amount of hungry people. I would gladly give up hamburgers in order to feed 90 starving children. It's like a lie of omission: knowing the truth and not speaking it is still deceitful. Knowing you can feed more people with a vegetarian lifestyle and still eating meat, is just like stopping those other 90 people from eating.

Now my math above may not be perfect, but my motives are pure, and my computations are close enough. My ideology and my heart are in the right place. And I hope each of my vegan rants and raves opens another person's mind.

So this is what I taught my sister to say: Eating veggies feed more people than eating meat. And with so many starving people in the world, why would I not want to do my part toward helping our world live. It's as simple and as complicated as that.