Rynn Berry

"The United Nations FAO report, Livestock’s Long Shadow, states that “The livestock sector is a major player, responsible for 18% of greenhouse gas emissions measured in CO2 equivalent. This is a higher share than transport.” (Transport causes 13.5 percent.)
    Furthermore, a vegan who eats plant foods and products based on them requires jut ¼ of the land needed to feed a meat-eater. The fossil energy needed to produce a day’s food for a vegan is only 1/3 that for a meat-eater. Most of the land now expended on rearing animals for food could be used to grow trees for lumber for fuel and food, or to grow industrial crops such as flax, hemp, etc.
    Moreover, Animals raised for human food consume enormous amounts of water. A day’s food for a meat-eater uses 5,0000 litres of water, whereas vegans use only 1,900. Finally, the waste excreted by farm animals is staggering — 23 kilograms of urine and dung — the ammonia and nitrates from which pollute both ground and surface waters."-----Answers About the Vegan Lifestyle in New York

"When my book “Famous Vegetarians” was published, I was constantly being heckled by hostile nonvegetarians who asked me why I hadn’t put Hitler in the book. So I decided to research the matter and discovered five primary sources and countless secondary sources attesting that Hitler continued to eat liver dumplings, cured ham and other meats throughout his life; so he was emphatically not a vegetarian. Also, I have many nonvegetarian friends who claim that they would become vegetarian were it not for the fact that Hitler had been a vegetarian. Recently the founder of USA Today, Al Neuharth, said in an opinion column that his wife and children were turning vegetarian, but he could never become one, because he, a World War II veteran, had fought against Hitler, the infamous vegetarian. For these and many other reasons, I thought it was important to correct the historical record."-----Answers About the Vegan Lifestyle in New York

"To say that humans have the anatomical structure of an omnivore is an egregiously inaccurate statement. The great taxonomist Carolus Linnaeus, (1707-1778), a Swedish naturalist and botanist who established the modern scientific method of classifying plants and animals, classified humans not as carnivores, not as omnivores, nor even as herbivores, but as frugivores. Linnaeus writes: “Man’s structure, internal and external compared with that of the other animals, shows that fruit and succulent vegetables are his natural food.”
    A few anthropologists have risen above their biases; one such is Jared Diamond, a professor of anthropology at UCLA. Diamond has written [pdf] that the notion of man the hunter is a romantic myth: “big-game hunting added little to our food intake until after we had evolved fully modern anatomy and behavior.”
    Instead, our earliest ancestors lived on the wild fruit, nuts, seeds and tubers that they gathered. Mr. Diamond puts it succinctly: “I doubt the usual view that hunting was the driving force behind our uniquely human brain and societies. For most of our history, we were not mighty hunters but rather sophisticated baboons.”
    And what food makes up the bulk of baboon diet? Fruit, of course; so for most of their history, humans were fruitarians."-----Answers About the Vegan Lifestyle in New York