I was catching up on old podcast and just learned Rebecca is a vegetarian. Is this common with skeptics? Are the rest of the show vegetarians? Is there a skeptical reason to be a vegetarian? The reason I ask is all the people I know in my personal life who are vegans or vegetarians seem to lack reality and believe in pseudoscience so I thought it was odd to find out Rebecca was a vegetarian? I could be getting this all wrong but that's ok I will change my views if anyone can clear this up for me. 
I think the argument from the vegans goes something like reducing suffering in the world. What's the science can determine right and wrong guy? Singer?
Reducing suffering is one argument. Just because it can't be quantified doesn't mean it's not a valid concept. Was there ever a point in your life where you were suffering more or less than you are right now?
But it's not the only argument, and I personally don't think it's very compelling. As a non-vegitarian, the most compelling argument for me (and the one currently battling my lazyness for control of my diet) is the environmental argument.
"
In the U.S., 70% of the grain grown is fed to animals on feedlots." According to my brother who teaches highschool ecology and could well be wrong, the rule of thumb is 10% efficiency for each step up the food chain. That would imply that, if we ate the grain itself instead of the animals that eat the grain, we would only need 7 of that 70%. That would drop our farm acreage down to 37% of its current total.
So if we all became vegitarians, we would save
2,349,900 km2 in the US.
That's 24% of our country. Imagine the national parks. Imagine the ecosystems we could restore.
