For my blog post today, I’m sharing a recent post I wrote for One Green Planet, a blog dedicated to ethical choices. Here’s an excerpt from “Making MOGO (most good) choices: The True Price of a Cheeseburger”:

“We eat many times each day, and there is no other daily choice that has a bigger impact on ourselves, other people, animals, and the environment than what foods we put into our bodies.

One of the staples of the western, industrialized diet is the ubiquitous cheeseburger. Many people know that cheeseburgers aren’t the healthiest of food choices. Some have heard that cheeseburgers take a hefty environmental toll. Animal protection advocates are aware of the cruelty in the beef and dairy industries. A few know about the human rights abuses that occur on industrial farms and in slaughterhouses. So what is the true price of a cheeseburger?

The effects on you

Let’s start with the positive effects of a cheeseburger. Most people eat cheeseburgers at fast food restaurants. They are convenient, tasty (at least to many people), inexpensive (because we pay for them through subsidies financed by our tax dollars), and filling.

The negative impacts on us occur over time, so we don’t notice them when we consume a burger, but eating a diet that regularly includes cheeseburgers can lead, over time, to heart disease, strokes, various cancers, weight gain and obesity, diabetes, kidney disease, and even impotence. Regular intake of high fat, high cholesterol foods such as cheeseburgers has been implicated in the major diseases of our time, killing around half a million people every year in the United States according to numerous epidemiological studies.”

Read the complete post.

For a humane world,

Zoe Weil, President, Institute for Humane Education
Author of Most Good, Least Harm, Above All, Be Kind, and The Power and Promise of Humane Education
My TEDx talk: “The World Becomes What You Teach“

Image courtesy of Hotels in Eastbourne.

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Filed under: critical thinking, food and diet, humane education, MOGO (Most Good) Tagged: | cheeseburgers, ethical choices, factory farming, food and diet, humane education, MOGO principle, Most Good Least Harm, true price