These are just a few headlines that have been gracing news outlets these past few days. The concept of veganism has been one of relatively high controversy for several years but within the past couple, the diet has been picking up steam — and fast.

 

More and more celebrities, influencers and just plain regular people have been venturing into the vegan diet and as Ne-Yo himself puts it best, loving it. Is it possible that veganism, or its slightly less extreme counterpart vegetarianism, be the new normal diet? Could we quite possibly get rid of meat for good?

 

Short answer, no. There’s simply no way for meat to rid itself from everyone’s diet. For one, it’s far too integrated into our culture already and in my opinion, the concept of eating meat isn’t the real problem here. It’s the factory farming system. Factory farming is the root of a lot of our problems here in America. The industry took something natural and exploited it in the name of profit into a booming, horrific business.

 

So what can we do to fix it? Is veganism the only way? In my opinion, veganism can do a lot of damage to the factory farming system, but only if there’s a significant amount of individuals who partake in it. As much as we’d like to think, one person cannot change the whole system. In order for veganism to have any sort of detrimental effects to the factory farming industry, there’d have to be a large wave of it.

 

So what else can we do? Factory farms truly do have the potential to derail the state of the environment, beyond what is already happening. I truly believe that if we want any sort of hope for our own and our kids’ futures, we must really make it a point to not purchase meat or products from these farms. It will be difficult. They’ve completely taken over the industry. It’s hard to find products that were produced ethically, but I really do think that it needs to happen. If not for us, for those who are coming after us.