Plant-Based Food System or System Collapse? | Pandemic-Proofing our Plates
There is a single species responsible for the current pandemic: Us. Humans.
This isn’t our first pandemic...and if we don't stop eating animals, it definitely won’t be our last.
COVID-19 has been merely the dress rehearsal for future global zoonotic disease outbreaks. Zoonotic diseases are diseases that originate in other animals and spread to humans. Well-known examples are SARS, Avian / Bird Flu, Swine Flu, Mad Cow Disease, Ebola, HIV, Measles, Smallpox, the "Spanish" Flu … and, of course, COVID-19.
Every year, we slaughter over 70 billion land animals for food around the world, with more than 90% of them in factory farms. This number doesn’t include the TRILLIONS of sea animals we kill around the globe on an annual basis.
Whether in a wet market or a barn, large numbers of highly stressed animals with weakened immune systems, living side-by-side and on top of one another, in cramped and filthy conditions, is the perfect breeding ground for viruses to flourish, mutate, and jump to humans. All farms, whether small and family-run or large industrial complexes, keep animals in intensively confined spaces like large-scale incubators where diseases can spread easily.
These animals are NOT social distancing.
But free-range or regenerative agriculture is not the answer. Raising animals on smaller farms results in mass deforestation to provide pasture for animals to graze and also to grow other crops to feed them, leading to massive encroachments into the natural world and causing biodiversity loss. Such environmentally destructive practices bring humans and domesticated animals in closer contact with wild animals and their pathogens.
We must demand that our governments, the media, and the public stop ignoring the source of pandemics happening time and again around the world, which is our dangerous and broken animal-based food system. By transitioning to a plant-based food system, we can stop zoonotic disease outbreaks in their tracks.
All the masks, social distancing, vaccinations, and hand sanitizer in the world will not avoid the next, and potentially worse, global outbreak.
Let’s take pandemics off the menu and make plant-based eating…the “new normal”.
For more information, please visit www.EatingAnimalsCausesPandemics.com
#EatingAnimalsCausesPandemics #PlantBasedFoodSystemOrSystemCollapse
