World Vegetarian Day and Veggie Birthday!

Today is World Vegetarian Day, a movement started in the U.S. which you can read more about on their website.

So why should we be interested? They’ve posted a few benefits of a vegetarian diet:

• Reduce the risk of major killers such as heart disease, stroke and cancer while cutting exposure to foodborne pathogens (less risk of food poisoning)
• Provide a viable answer to feeding the world’s hungry through more efficient use of grains and other crops.
• Save animals from suffering in factory-farm conditions and from the pain and terror of slaughter.
• Conserve vital and limited freshwater, fertile topsoil and other precious resources.
• Preserve irreplaceable ecosystems such as rainforests and other wildlife habitats.
• Decrease greenhouse gases that are accelerating global warming.
• Combats the growing environmental pollution of animal agriculture.

Every meal helps. If you don’t feel you can go veggie all at once, start by reducing the amount of meat and fish that you eat. It all has a positive effect on the environment, reducing your carbon footprint and water impact. Many people already do this for health reasons and #MeatFreeMonday is a rising trend, backed by chefs like Jamie Oliver. If you need a bit of inspiration take a look through our thousands of vegetarian products, or have a look at the Vegetarian Society website.

A few handy facts:

• YES vegetarians (and vegans) can get enough protein. And iron. And every other nutrient your body needs.
• Vegetarians don’t eat fish – that’s a pescetarian diet.
• In the UK alone, over 2.5 million animals are slaughtered every day.
• It takes thousands more litres of water to produce a kilo of beef than to grow the same quantity of grains, vegetables or pulses.
• Pigs are incredibly intelligent animals and can be trained like our best friends, dogs! They can learn more commands than even dogs can, making them very smart indeed.

Happy birthday!

This week, the UK’s Vegetarian Society celebrated their 168th birthday. I had no idea they’d even been around that long! That makes the efforts of their founders and early members even more impressive, in a time where a vegetarian diet really would have been seen as unusual. They work hard in the UK to make sure food brands are labelled correctly, that brands claiming to be vegetarian really are, and to enable chefs and restaurants to provide fantastic vegetarian options for food outlets – so long may it continue! More than ever before it’s easy to be vegetarian or vegan and has increasing benefits for our planet and animals, not to mention us.