Eh, I think there are some very valid arguments to be made for eating lower on the food chain. I am not a big fan of <i>moral&quot; arguments per se. Those folks saying they are vegetarian because they think eating animals is somehow cruel or something are basically saying that if they can&#x27;t hear it scream, its suffering doesn&#x27;t count. We have scientific proof that plants &quot;scream&quot; (give off a pulse) when attacked and also communicate chemically with their neighbors when infested with insects, etc. So plants do have some kind of awareness of being physically assaulted and they communicate in some manner about this awareness, it is just a form of communication that human ears cannot detect. Saying &quot;if I cannot hear it scream, it is all okey dokey&quot; opens up all kinds of ugly questions (like &quot;Is it okay to be a serial killer if you are deaf?&quot;)<p>Anyway, some good arguments to get most of your calories from things lower on the food chain:<p>1) Ultimately, all calories start as sunlight. Eating lower on the food chain makes our resources go further because the higher up the food chain you go, the more sunlight is concentrated in those few calories.<p>2) Health. There are several metrics which are negatively impacted by eating higher on the food chain. Toxic chemicals that negatively impact human health tend to concentrate in the fats of animals. Eating vegetarian tends to reduce your exposure to a toxic world. You are also more likely to get serious diseases, like e. coli and certain parasitic infections, from meat than from plants. Most food poisoning comes from meat or dairy, not plants.<p>3) Cost. </i>Diet for a Small Planet* documented the fact that every country on the planet (at the time it was written) had the ability to produce enough food from traditional, mostly vegetarian, diets to feed all their people. Famine was due to political things, like civil war, and the fact that meat was too costly for poor families who had become accustomed to it and no longer ate the traditional, mostly vegetarian, local diet.<p>I am not a vegetarian. I am someone who eats more vegetarian meals than I did growing up and I have at times been accused of being a vegetarian by my meat-and-potatoes relatives. I also relatively rarely eat beef simply because I am really picky about the quality of my beef. I probably eat less meat on average than the typical American and I am satisfied with the healthfulness of my diet these days. I think a less-meat diet would do most American good. A meatless diet is not really critical and even the author of &quot;Diet for a Small Planet&quot; later relented on her vegetarian stance and repositioned it as &quot;One less hamburger&quot; in a follow-up book, indicating that we stretch the planets resources by reducing our excessive consumption of meat without giving it up entirely.