Transcriber: Lucas Kaimaras Reviewer: Anna Sobota
I am going to be talking to you about vegetarianism.
Defined as the practice of not eating meat or fish,
especially for moral, religious or health reasons,
a lot of people have opinions about this topic.
I’ll reach out to the audience:
What do you guys think?
How many of you are actually vegetarians?
This is a show of hands.
Got one in the back there.
So why are you vegetarian?
“I don’t like meat.”
It’s a valid reason, okay.
How many of you eat meat?
It’s a lot of people, okay.
Can somebody shout out why you eat meat?
Anyone?
“Tastes good.”
Sure, anything else?
“I grew up eating meat and have to change my diet.”
Got two.
So those are all reasons I kept on when I still ate meat.
But today I’m going to talk to you about:
Why vegetarianism?
It’s economically beneficial,
better for the planet and better for your body.
I’ll rewind back 11 years in time
when I was a little four-year-old baby going to a British school in Texas.
It all started one day when my dad brought home a Big Mac as a treat -
my parents don’t give me that all the time, thankfully.
So he set down the Big Mac on the kitchen table,
and I sat there looking at this Big Mac, thinking about what I was about to eat.
And I thought to myself, being spacey as I usually am:
What am I actually putting in my body?
“Meat”, he said when I asked him,
and I didn’t know what that was because I was four
and he told me that it was a dead animal.
Now, that was the catalyst for me being a vegetarian.
Not economic reasons,
not anything deep or philosophical or anything,
just because it was a dead animal.
Here are some famous people you might recognize.
We got Einstein, Gandhi,
Leonardo da Vinci - not DiCaprio, guys -
and Mary Shelley.
So it didn’t just start as a new phenomenon.
This has been going on for a long time.
Why am I telling you this?
Why am I up here giving a speech
when I can be at home relaxing?
For a lot of reasons.
Every single hour, factory farms kill 1 million animals.
This is roughly 333,000 animals during just this presentation.
And this is all a choice.
We cut down one acre of rainforest for cattle every 6 seconds,
or 180 acres during this talk.
This is unnecessarily used land.
This is land that’s not used in a good way, this is wasted land.
We could be using this to cultivate things for people who are starving,
in a better way.
We’re wasting land in an inefficient way.
It takes 50 full bathtubs of water
to produce one single pound of meat.
We have our local Safeways.
So, think one pound of meat.
Go to the store about to make some meatballs.
I don’t know, I don’t eat meat.
You guys can make your filet mignon or whatever.
So 16 ounces usually about - How many is that?
I couldn’t tell you, but that’s a lot of bathtubs.
Factory farming is responsible for more contamination
than all industrial sources combined.
So, that could be a paper mill,
you name it.
All that smog you see in San Francisco along with the homeless people,
the gross blackness that’s surrounding the city
that was once beautiful and clear,
all of that combined,
just the stuff that you eat for breakfast, Jimmy Hortons or whatever -
that is damaging our planet more.
As a visual element, this is a factory farm up here.
This is actually better conditions for a factory farm.
Those are chickens, not little yellow blobs.
Those are chickens.
And that’s the Amazon rainforest completely decimated
just to house animals and meat in your McDonald’s
or my Big Mac when I was four.
And then we have your average farm.
Those are cows.
And all of that land could be used for basically anything else.
And then right there, we have runoff or contamination from factory farms.
That gross stuff you see right there is going into our water systems.
So, pretty disgusting if it is sitting on myself.
And then we have global land use for agriculture across different diets.
So this is the current global diet.
The pasture section is a huge part of that
totaling to 4.13 billion hectares.
So if we flipped on the other side
to a vegan diet -
1 billion hectares,
completely eliminating that pasture section
and all those photos I showed you of wasting land
full of these animals that are packed in and mistreated.
So, if everyone ate a vegan diet,
we’d reduce the amount of land we use for agriculture by 75%.
So this is roughly the area of North America plus Brazil.
Just for a visual element for you guys,
this is North America and this is Brazil.
Not to scale, obviously, but that land could be used
for so many better things rather than housing animals.
So this is another chart from our world in data
showing a thousand kilocalories and the land used for this.
Beef and lamb are on top once again.
And then we got maize at the very bottom producing the same amount of calories,
feeding you in the same way, providing the same nutrients,
but not using up all this land
and polluting the environment
in the same way that methane could damage our environment.
I’m telling you all this, I’m standing up here,
but is this actually a solution for world’s hunger?
Now, what do you guys think?
Is this is a solution for world hunger?
Yes?
No?
Maybe?
I heard someone say no earlier.
So, a solution of world hunger...
I already told you that it’s more land efficient.
I already told you that beef takes up more land
and raising sheep takes up more land.
So, yes, I do actually think this is the solution for world’s hunger.
Accessibility comes into play but most importantly,
using land in the right way will help people.
We can actually grow food for people and help them
and put food in their bellies,
instead of charging these expensive rates for meat which is actually going up
and vegan meat prices are going down.
So it’s more cost efficient and we can actually feed people with it.
Additionally, how does it actually affect your body?
Vegetarians live about seven years longer than meat eaters or vegans.
Roughly 14 years.
So how many of you guys want some more years in your life?
I know I do.
I don’t want to die at 15, thank you.
Seven more years to solve cancer.
Seven more years to do whatever you want.
I frankly would like seven more years in my life.
And you’re one third less likely to be hospitalized for heart disease.
That could be liver cancer, colon failure, you name it.
Eating red meat on a daily basis is not good for you.
This is actually food that I’ve made in the past year over quarantine.
See that toast up there?
Avocado toast.
Are you guys like avocado toast?
I ate that during finals week.
Perfectly good.
It looks pretty good.
It tastes pretty good.
Filled me up
and my brain worked just fine.
And a lot of the stuff I actually used for my pack lunch,
so a lot of my friends saw me eat this stuff.
Some of it not as good looking as this
but this is my best creations up on stage for you guys.
Got some sweet potatoes, kale, avocado - a lot of themes in there.
Pretty cheap ingredients, actually.
My parents, I’m lucky enough to get support from them
to buy these ingredients as well.
So, I looked at my fridge.
I looked at some brands that I particularly like:
Field Roast, Trader Joe’s, Daring, Tofurky -
all pretty affordable brands you can find at Safeways and stuff.
So, once again: Why vegetarianism?
I’ll sum it up for you guys.
Economically beneficial,
better for the planet,
and better for your body.
I’ll end with the question of
how can you lead a more plant-based diet?
Thank you.
(Applause)