Somewhere in the world, a child dies of hunger every five seconds -- even though the planet has more than enough food for all.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon laid out this sobering statistic as he kicked off a three-day summit on world food security Monday in Rome.

"Today, more than 1 billion people are hungry," he told the assembled leaders. Six million children die of hunger every year -- 17,000 every day, he said.

Much of the world's massive hunger problems could be solved by the reduction or elimination of meat-eating.
The reasons:

1. Livestock pasture needs cut drastically into land which could otherwise be used to grow food
2. Vast quantities of food which could feed humans is fed to livestock raised to produce meat. 

It takes an average of 5-10 lbs of edible grain, to make 1 lb of meat as you grow a calf or piglet to full size livestock!!!

It takes 7 times as much fossil fuel and conservative estimates are 50X as much water.

David Pimentel argues that vegetarianism is much more environment-friendly than diets revolving around meat. "In terms of caloric content, the grain consumed by American livestock could feed 800 million people-and, if exported, would boost the U.S. trade balance by $80 billion a year."