I found Christa Jensen’s letter to the editor concerning vegetarianism to be quite disturbing. Jensen starts out by stating, “I could cite statistic after statistic stating reasons why vegetarianism can actually be harmful for humans.”

I would like to see these statistics Jensen mentions, because I suspect Jensen has failed to use current statistics.

Ironically, this is what Jensen accused Jonquil Wegmann of doing.

Jensen is correct that the statistics which Wegmann used in her column are not current. I recognized the statistics as coming from the book “Diet for a New America,” by John Robbins, published in 1987.

In attempting to clear up the “myths” in Wegmann’s article, Jensen manipulates some of the facts and creates a few “myths” of her own.

First, Wegmann stated that meat production uses 50 percent of all water consumed in the U.S. for any purpose. Although this is exaggerated, Wegmann used the word production.

Jensen states only three percent of all water is used for livestock consumption. Jensen fails to tell us how much water was used in the irrigation of crops fed to livestock.

Second, Wegmann states that more people could survive if the world did not eat meat.

Jensen refutes this by citing a study at Texas Tech.

Jensen says, “The maximum sustainable population of humans would only be approximately 20 to 30 million people if hunting and gathering hadn’t been replaced with organized agriculture.”

With all the technology we have in processing vegetable matter into a form consumable by humans, fortifying food with vitamins and minerals and producing synthetic fertilizers for crops, what makes livestock a required part of modern organized agriculture?

Finally, if beef cattle are such efficient protein converters, why would members of the agriculture industry show interest in researching the domestication of the ostrich? A moderated diet in which meat is a minor portion of the meal is just as healthy as a balanced vegetarian diet.

Ultimately, the question of eating meat will be a question of ethics.

The bio-ethics program here at ISU is a good source of information for anyone interested in both sides of the ethics issue.

Parks Library also carries books by the animal rights philosophers Peter Singer and Tom Regan and the anti-animal rights philosophers R.G. Frey and Michael P.T. Leahy.

For those of you interested, Leahy defends the eating of livestock while Frey, under the condition that an alternative(s) to meat in the human diet exists, does not.

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Jonathan Kavanaugh

Graduate Student

Electrical engineering

Member of the ISU Vegetarian Club