A Vegetarian Planet by 2050?

A recent study by leading scientists shows that most of the world's population will have to become vegetarian by the year 2050 due to food shortages. The food shortage crisis has many culprits, climate change and a booming population being the two biggest reasons for the coming food shortages. While to some this may seem like a fate worse than death, it makes others wonder why we don't just all go vegan or vegetarian now and try to head off the coming shortages. 

Scientists are claiming that, based on current diets of the world's people, there will not be enough water to produce crops to feed cattle and other animals for consumption by 2050. This also leads to the scary thought about clean water shortages in places that have always enjoyed an uninterrupted supply of fresh drinking water. The world's diets have changed drastically over recent years, most notably the increase in animal products in the Asian diet, which now nearly meets the same levels of demand as in North America.

The same scientists have said that the only way to head off the coming food crisis is to dramatically decrease the amount of animal products in our diets, less than 5% of our daily calories, so that the available water can be used to grow crops for human consumption rather than animal consumption - a fact that Dr. Campbell addresses frequently in The China Study as does Jonathan Foer in Eating Animals. 

The United Nations have even come forward to say that a vegan and vegetarian diet is the least taxing on our natural food resources and is likely the only way we'll make it through dramatic food shortages in the coming years.