1. Helping animals also helps the global poor

While there is ample and justified moral indignation about the diversion of millions of tonnes of grain for biofuels, more than seven times as much is fed to farmed animals so that people can eat meat. Is the diversion of crops to our cars a moral issue? Yes, and a complex one, but not as pressing as the issue that meat-eating is.

2. Eating meat supports cruelty to animals

The green pastures and idyllic barnyard scenes of years past are now distant memories. On today's factory farms, animals are crammed by the thousands into filthy windowless sheds, wire cages, gestation crates and other confined spaces.

BACKGROUND

• London's top ten veggie restaurants

• Hearty vegetarian bean stew

• Real Food Pioneer: Harriet Lamb

• Kids' food expert: are lambs too cute to eat?

Seasonal food recipe finder: May

Raymond Blanc's asparagus tips and Celia Brooks Brown on spring herbs and May's seafood

• A Life in the Day: Fergus Drennan

• Food detective: anchovies

• Cauliflower power

BACKGROUND

• Top 35 organic box schemes in the UK

• Fairtrade dinner party menu

• Never mind organic, feel the food print

• Official: organic really is better

• Locavores: the new food fad

Related Links

• Is in vitro meat the future?

These animals will never raise families, root in the soil, build nests, or do anything else that is natural and important to them. They won't even get to feel the warmth of the sun on their backs or breathe fresh air until the day they are loaded onto trucks bound for slaughter.

3. Eating meat is bad for the environment

A recent United Nations report entitled Livestock's Long Shadow concluded that eating meat is "one of the ... most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global."

For example, eating meat causes almost 40 per cent more greenhouse-gas emissions than all the cars, trucks and planes in the world combined.

The report concludes that the meat industry "should be a major policy focus when dealing with problems of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity."

4. Avoid bird flu

The World Health Organisation says that if the avian flu virus mutates, it could be caught simply by eating undercooked chicken or eggs, eating food prepared on the same cutting board as infected meat or eggs, or even touching eggshells contaminated with the disease. Other problems with factory farming – from foot-and-mouth to SARS – can be avoided with a general shift to a vegetarian diet.

5. If you wouldn't eat a dog, you shouldn't eat a chicken

Times Recommends

• Top Ten most searched for recipes
• Chalet Chef 2010: the winning menus
• Gin and pomegranate jellies