The Dot Project is Over!!!
Finally, I can go back to eating meat!
I want to start out by saying: these have not been a hard 4 weeks. I have not found myself craving for the excellent juiciness of a burger, or the delicious crunchiness of some chicken tenders. By the end of the project, it had become almost second nature to eat a vegetarian snack instead of something with meat in it. BUT. This does not mean that I am not glad that the project is over, or that I will continue to be vegetarian. As fun as it was to be vegetarian, I would definitely not do it again, at least not until I am older. On the other hand, there’s the amount of meat I saved. I saved a total of 14.5 pounds of meat during this project, which might not seem like a whole lot, but that means that I would have saved approximately 191 pounds of meat in a whole year! As you can see in my google sheet, the total effect of me eating 1 ounce of meat in a total of 28 days was that I would have saved 3055 oz. of meat, or 191 lbs., if I had done this for a year. That means that, with the respective quantities of meat saved, I would have saved over half a pig, a third of a cow, and over 15 chickens! Most Americans eat slightly more meat than me, about 220 pounds every year, so imagine how many animals could be spared if all Americans were vegetarian. If they ate the same as me, in one year we would save at least 110 million cows, 165 million pigs, and 4.95 billion chickens!
If this was about humans, every single person on this planet would be protesting these numbers, but as it is, there are only a fraction of a percentage of people who stand up for animal rights. According to PETA, “ In the United States, approximately 9 billion chickens are killed for their flesh each year, and 305 million hens are used for their eggs.” This is almost twice the number that I had predicted, and this is just insane.
Thank you, everybody, for sticking with me throughout this journey to find a new way of living and to learn just how much the meat industry affects our planet. Even though I am going to stop being vegetarian, I hope anyone reading this will follow in my footsteps and become vegetarian, for whatever reason.
