As food riots break out around the globe, vegetarianism seems like more than a way of being kind to animals. It's about eating as efficiently as possible, so that grains destined for livestock will reach people instead.

A bit of background: I love meat. It's a part of the human biological heritage that I've never managed, or really even tried, to shake.

(Heck, my cousin's diet was so one-dimensionally carnivorous that he became jaundiced. If humans are predisposed to meat, my family is downright prejudiced.)

As I grew older and my palate more sophisticated, I learned to appreciate the joys of vegetables and grains and fruits. I ate more of these, and after reading Michael Pollan's "This Steer's Life" tried to make sure that the animals I consumed lived and died as decently as possible. But going non-meat was a non-starter. Even when environmentalists pointed to the extraordinary

greenhouse gas burden of global livestock, I put it out of mind.

I'm not sure if I can sustain that willful blindness anymore. In the last month, something largely ignored by the public but long predicted in organizational white papers and academic studies has come to pass:

widespread food shortages. Ballooning prices. Outright riots. Neighbor fighting neighbor. Countries scrambling to feed themselves, export partners be damned. From the International Herald Tribune:

Hunger bashed in the front gate of Haiti's presidential palace. Hunger poured onto the streets, burning tires and taking on soldiers and the police. Hunger sent the country's prime minister packing. Haiti's hunger, that burn in the belly that so many here feel, has become fiercer than ever in recent days as global food prices spiral out of reach, spiking as much as 45 percent since the end of 2006 and turning Haitian staples like beans, corn and rice into closely guarded treasures.

Haiti is a flashpoint, but other countries are on the same path. In the last year, riots have also taken place in Egypt, Cameroon, Peru, Guinea, Mauritania,

Mexico, Senegal, Uzbekistan, Yemen and Indonesia. The World Bank estimates that 33 countries are similarly threatened by social unrest;

experts at last week's International Food Aid Conference described a

"perfect storm" of factors producing a rise in food costs, and rice prices jumping 50% in just two weeks in March. Panic has struck Malaysia,

Thailand and the Philippines, where hoarding rice is now a crime punishable by life imprisonment. Japan, China and South Korea are buying overseas farmland. China, Egypt, Vietnam and India are cutting crop exports, driving global prices even higher. Even where there is food to eat, people often don't have the money to buy it.

And it's quite possible that this is just the beginning. From The Star:

"World agriculture has entered a new, unsustainable and politically risky period," Joachim von Braun, head of the Washington-based

International Food Policy Research Institute told The Economist, after

G8 finance ministers ended their summit last weekend declaring that global hunger had eclipsed in importance the worldwide credit and climate-change crises they had gathered to discuss. There is a consensus among agricultural economists that a 30-year era of cheap food is over.

What's responsible for this crisis? Many things. Mistaken global trade policies and national mismanagement. The petering out of the Green Revolution. The

diversion of crops to fuel. Famine profiteering. None of these are easily addressed by you or me – but one thing that is in our power is our own diet. It takes an estimated five pounds of grain to produce a single pound of beef.

Even before this crisis, food experts said the world could not feed itself in coming decades if growing populations in developing countries insisted on a meat-rich western diet. That time may already have arrived – and largely without climate-change induced agricultural disruption. Add droughts and years of failing harvests, and things get seriously scary.

So maybe it's time for taste to take a back seat to conscience. I know that sacrificing meat for veggies won't solve the problem on its own, but it's certainly just as meaningful as using compact fluorescent bulbs or cloth shopping bags, and I do that without hesitation. And it might take a while to reduce my meat consumption to zero, but at the very least I can start cutting back. Starting tonight.

What do you think, Wired Science readers? Will you go vegetarian, too?

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Image: Kris*

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