Reading
1. Read the tekst
«Vegetarians» and choose the best variant
The word «vegetarian» was coined in about 1840 to mean people who lived without killing for food, either for moral or health reasons, or both. But the practice is much older than that. Greek philosophers recommended vegetarianism and famous people who have practiced it in the past include Leonardo da Vinci, Tolstoy and Voltaire, Milton, Newton and Bernard Show. Surely this proves that mental activity does not depend on flesh foods. What are the arguments that might stop us from eating meat?
Man`s body is more like those of fruit-eating animals than like those of flesh-eating animals. For millions of years man must have lived on fruit, nuts and leaves and so developed a digestive system. Perhaps the more we move away from this diet towards meat-eating, the less likely we are to be healthy. Cancer, tuberculosis and heart disease are certainly more common in meat eating communities. Man may have started eating the flesh of animals during the Ice Age when most vegetation was destroyed.
A diet of vegetables, fruit, grains and nuts together with a few dairy products can give us all the vitamins and minerals we need. By eating meat we are getting the basic food elements secondhand after they have been digested by the animal. It is worth considering how wasteful meat-eaters are with land. A meat-eater needs about three times as much land to support himself and his animals as a vegetarian does. For every 45 kilos of dry food eaten by cattle only 1,8-7,3 kilos come back as food for us humans – an expensive method of producing food.