Why did you choose to be vegetarian or vegan?!

I originally became a vegetarian out of convenience. My girlfriend is vegetarian, and I just ended up becoming one myself over the years.

Now, I have my own reasons for being vegetarian. First and foremost, I think it's a great way to limit the footprint we leave on the environment. Meat production is responsible for huge amounts of pollution, from waterways and aquifers, to increased CO2 emissions.

Meat production is also an incredibly inefficient way to produce calories. For every 10 calories of grain fed to animals, only 1 calorie makes it to the plate for human consumption. That grain could be more useful if it simply bypassed animals for meat, and was directly consumed by humans. Not to mention all the other considerations that go into meat production - like transport and housing. If animals are used appropriately in farm operations, they can yield higher calorie output of the whole farm by utilizing grass on soil that cannot support vegetable or grain production, and eat scraps left over on the farm, but this is not the case with 99.99% of the meat produced in the world.

Then, one must also consider the ways in which meat has been industrialized. Animals are simply not treated well in an overwhelming majority of the cases, being kept in tight quarters, living in their own excrement, and being injected with all sorts of antibiotics and hormones to maximize their products. This is no way to treat an animal, for meat or otherwise.

The health effects seem to be a mere bonus to abstaining from all these ethical and environmental issues. I feel better, get sick less, maintain a proper weight, and have more energy in part due to my vegetarian diet. I love eating more vegetables, fruits, and whole grains as a replacement for the meat that was once in my diet.

Vegetarian is definitely the way to go.

http://vegonline.org/Becoming-Vegetarian…

Well my story is a little weird i really didnt choose to be vegetarian
Im a muslim and I live in the US. Muslims cant eat pig meat at all. And whenever we eat chicken or cow or other meat the animal has to slaughtered a certain way. The animal has to be slaughtered by cutting from the neck or cutting the main vein in the neck which causes all of the blood of the animal to leek out because if you kill it other ways like shooting it the blood of the animal will absorb into the meat making it impossible to clean out.For muslims eating blood of anything is unholy.So i cant eat at mcdonalds or school meat because the meat is from an animal that has been killed by a gun or by shots.
Sorry if i was so graphic but its really hard for me to explain this to ppl i know
The way that muslims kill animals is actually the best way and the animal dies instantly so it doenst have to go through a lot of pain like if someone shot it. Also the meat becomes alot healthier.
So me and my family always buy our meat from a HALAL meat shop which is a special meat store for muslims. But its so expensive that me and my family just started to become vegetarian

ANd now i only eat beef or chicken on holidays and i usually stay vegetarian most of the time
Also i think alot of muslims in the US dont follow this rule because its so hard to follow

The reason muslims kill animals this way is because of the story of the prophet Abraham which is mentioned in the chiristian bible as well as the muslim quran
Abraham was told to sacrifice his son if he truely loved God and he was about to kill his son and then angel gabriel came down and told him not to because it was just a test and told him to slaughter the sheep instead.
IDK if you know the story.
Sorry i wrote so much i dont know if i made any sense at all lol

When I was in the 6th grade, a boy in my class did a project about KFC. He told us all about their chicken torture and what not. It grossed me out so much that I decided to be a vegetarian. When I was 16, I had been considering trying a vegan diet for my health. I was going to try it when I went to college (which was a long way off back then). I decided I'd do it for a couple of weeks to see what it was like. I found that my frequent stomach aches went away, and discovered that I'm lactose intolerant. And I loved it! So I never switched back.

At first it was for the ethics. The fact that meat production is a waste of energy was a secondary factor.

I stay vegetarian to a large degree because I really don't care about meat. It's more effort to cook, and I can't see the point. Health factors are a large pull, since I need all the help I can get.

I never liked meat, all that fat, tubey veins, bones, yuk. So I stopped eating it. Now I choose not to eat anything similar to humans - with brains, skin, bones, blood, fur/hair, emotions, feelings, memories and family or social groups.

I went vegan for ethical reasons. The environmental and health benefits are definitely great bonuses.

vegan :D

Because I woke up one day and thought, "Why not? Why do I have to eat meat if I can be just as healthy on a vegetarian diet?"

I went vegetarian for moral reasons.

Instinct.