How Many Animals Can You Save By Eating Freegan?
A wonderful benefit of eating freegan is the number of animals you can save. Eating food that would otherwise be going to waste eliminates the demand to kill animals for meat.
I wondered, how many animal lives could you theoretically save by eating completely freegan for a year, compared to eating an “average” American diet?
This could be calculated if I could find the average number of animals a U.S. meat eater eats. PETA estimates that you can save 200+ animals by eating vegan [1]. A more comprehensive estimate made by Noam Mohr [2] estimates that by not eating animals for a year, you save, on average:
- 1/8th of a cow
- 1/3rd of a pig
- 5/6th of a turkey
- 25 ½ chickens
- 43 finfish
- 134 shellfish
for a grand total of 204 animals.
For every year that you eat freegan, you save the lives of over 200 animals! Even if you only ate freegan for one week, you would save the lives of 4 animals! And this isn’t even taking into account the prevented suffering from a potential life of captivity, milking, and/or egg-laying.
If you’re a vegan, you’re already preventing killing and suffering – congrats! For non-vegans, freeganism is a great way to eat animal foods without contributing to killing and suffering. Everyone wins!
-Freddy
[1] https://www.peta.org/
[2] https://www.upc-online.org/slaughter/2011americans.pdf Mohr used data from the U.S. Government and the U.N. He derived estimates from slaughter figures, with deaths from all causes, including: disease, injury, culling, by-catch, discarded male egg-type chickens, production of food that is discarded and not consumed, etc. For full estimates, click here.