Vegan Fast Food Burgers Are Saving 250,000 Animals A Year

2019 has been the year of vegan food. This year, most popular fast-food chains and their customers fell in love with plant-based meat alternatives. At the moment, at least 18 quick-service restaurant chains in the U.S. are offering Impossible Foods meatless meat products, and 9 other chains are serving plant-based meat options from Beyond Meat. 

According to World Animal Protection, this makes up an equivalent of around 250,000 animals saved from the slaughter every year including 140,000 pigs and 110,000 cows. The organisation estimated these numbers based on sales of the meat-free burgers at chain restaurants.It may sound like a lot, but it’s just a small fragment of 120 million pigs and 30 million cows killed each year for food in the U.S. 

World Animal Protection wants people to realise how each vegan meal represents an animal’s life saved from industrial farms and slaughterhouses. 

The organisation expects the number of saved animals to increase in 2020 as the demand for plant-based products increase and new restaurants are expected to add more vegan options to their menus. The plant-based alternatives manufacturers are constantly improving their products to mimic the taste and texture of real meat, and there will be new offerings launching on the market in 2020, including vegan chicken and fish alternatives.  According to World Animal Protection, this will have a larger impact on the overall number since the smaller animals are killed for food in significantly higher numbers.

Every vegan meal order and purchase means less demand for farmed meat so higher consumption of meat-free option in fast food restaurants will result in fewer animals being raised and killed on factory farms in the future. 

“Never being born is preferable to a short life filled with suffering and misery on a factory farm.”