LH, good points. I know as a vegetarian, I still do not get enough protein, partly from bad habits from not knowing how to use soy and partly from not being able to use lots of higher protein products due to high sodium content including cheeses and even the soy-based "hot dogs." :-) Might also point out that about 2/3rds of the planet's surface is given over to grazing of animals used for meat. A very inefficient and not very healthy use of our resources. Here's more:



How Our Food Choices Can Help Save the Environment
From a speech delivered to EarthSave Baltimore
by Professor Steve Boyan

The Union of Concerned Scientists says that the two things that people can do which will most help the environment are (1) to drive a fuel efficient automobile (that means, not a SUV or a truck), along with a decision to live near to where you work. That recommendation is indeed important. Anything you can do either in what you drive or where you live is important. The 2nd thing the Union of Concerned Scientists proposed that people could do which also would have dramatically good consequences for the environment: to not eat beef.

I'm going to go one step farther than UCS: I suggest that you refuse to eat any animal or animal product produced on a factory farm. And I'm going to tell you why.

In 1990, when I first read, that 10 people could be fed with the grain that you would feed a cow that would be turned into food for one person, I was impressed. But I was not moved. The reason was: if 10 people would be fed because I gave up meat, I'd give it up. But, I thought, if I give up meat, it won't have that impact: it probably won't have any impact on anything at all, except me.

I was wrong. If I had known that for every pound of beef I did not eat, I would save anywhere from 2500 to 5000 gallons of water - you heard it, for every pound of beef, 2500 to 5000 gallons of water, I would have been moved. It's a good idea to save water; we are depleting our underground aquifers faster than we are replenishing them. The largest one, the Ogallala, which covers a vast part of the country from the mid-west to the mountain states, is being depleted by 13 trillion gallons a year. It is going to run out. Northwest Texas is already dry. They can't get any water from their wells.

One may read the rest of it HERE.

Steve, the way I read it, is HH is striving to be a supremely compassionate being, which we might all hope for, for ourselves. He is after all huan like hte rest of us. While he struggles with this, his compromise is that he not participate in the death of the animals which provide him with food. I am sure, at some point, he will be able to go completely vegetarian and will have attained that state of Compassion which is so desirable. I would note he has it down to six months out of the year.