Editor's Note: Mickey Z (Michael Zezima) is the author of Saving Private Power: The Hidden History of "The Good War" (Soft Skull Press, 2000). He also contributed a chapter called "Saving Private Power" to You Are Being Lied To (New York: Disinfo Books, 2001), edited by Russ Kick.

While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions on this planet?
~~ George Bernard Shaw

I'm a vegan. I dont eat meat, chicken, fish, eggs, dairy products, honey, or any other animal-derived food. Why not? Well, besides being a superb pretext for avoiding family gatherings like Thanksgiving, I'm doing my part to, well, save the planet. This isn't about ideology or opinion: the facts are in and eating animals is out. Americans are over-consuming blood, bone, fat, and muscle in a major way. This repellent little secret has not only helped bring about an epidemic of degenerative disease, the carnage caused by eating our furry, scaly, and winged co-inhabitants impacts the entire planet.

There's much more to this lifestyle than can be covered in one article: Vegans also don't "wear" animals (wool, fur, leather, down) and purists reject our ubiquitous automobile culture (1,000,000 animals killed per week by cars, plus the incalculable cost of building highways, strip malls, and parking lots upon once-thriving eco-systems). So, what will be addressed now is how our choices affect the entire globe.

Howard Lyman, the former-cattleman-turned-vegan who was sued (along with Oprah) for having the audacity to mention mad cow disease on national TV says:

"To make our choices informed ones, we have to start with the facts."

The only dilemma is selecting which facts to squeeze into this piece.

Should I inform you that amid the incessant rhetoric about societal violence, 9 billion animals will be murdered this year for food? Do I elucidate how at 98.7° (body temperature), animal fat is solid (think: pork chop) while plant fat (olive oil) is liquid? Not surprisingly, the risk of death from heart attack for the average American is 50%; for a vegan, 4%.

Here's one I couldn't resist: Since our digestive tract is too long to efficiently digest meat, that pork chop I mentioned can sit there putrefying and releasing carcinogens for weeks. Correspondingly, Americans ingest more laxatives than anyone else on the globe. Think about it: almost all our legislative, judicial, health-related, and military decisions are made by constipated old guys.

Is it useful to articulate that roughly 14 times as many people could be fed by using the same land currently reserved for grazing and a principal reason our rain forests are disappearing at the rate of a football field per second is to make way to raise doomed cattle for insatiable American flesh-eaters? I'll wager you haven't seen anything on CNN lately about how the water needed to maintain this bloody enterprise is drained from rivers, depleting hydroelectric plants, and inspiring Westinghouse to construct more nuclear power plants to eventually leak and anoint us all with a steady dose of plutonium aromatherapy.

Got milk? Before showing off your mustache, bear in mind that cow's milk has 3 times more protein and 7 times more mineral content than human milk, which contains 10 times the essential fatty acids, 3 times the selenium, and half the calcium.

Had enough? If not, consider the John Harris test:

Go to your local morgue, er, butcher shop, and take a good look at the raw meat and the blood. Smell the smell of death. Check out the sheep hanging on hooks. Inhale deeply and ask yourself: Am I getting hungry? Am I salivating? Is my stomach growling? Do I want to grab the ground beef and eat it raw? Next, try the fruit and vegetable stand. Smell the strawberries, the papayas, the peppers. Inhale deeply and ask yourself: Am I getting hungry? Am I salivating? Are the sights and smells tantalizing me? Do I want to grab that pear and eat it?

At that point, you'll have a pretty good idea of what the natural foods for humans are.

Still thinking? Try the Mickey Z test:

Each day, 27 American children die from poverty and starvation while 15 million animals are slaughtered for food. Worldwide, 60 million people starve to death each year. Every 55 seconds, an American dies of cancer. Every 45 seconds, an American suffers a fatal heart attack. Every two seconds, on planet earth, a child starves to death.

Go ahead, do the math. How many have we lost while you read this article? Seems the most lethal weapon in the human arsenal is the fork.