Charting Suffering and Economics

I'll be taking economnomics next semester and so my focus on environmental impacts of animal use for the environment class will shift to economic considerations. I just realized that I've written about economics in previous posts and I should find plenty of animal use issues to raise in the econ class.

Today I imagined presenting a chart comparing the prices of some similar animal and vegetable products (burgers, etc) to the very animal dependent middle class, who often uses the extra cost of buying a box of veggie burgers to justify never even trying one.

Maybe in terms of how many animals and acres of rainforests would be saved by spending a few bucks extra on veggie burgers. Maybe even include the offset for long term medical costs and you'd end up saving some money. If you could include lost productivity from an early death I'm sure the figures would come up ahead for vegetables.

And of course if we could get the whole agricultural subsidy situation fixed, that would go a long way to straightening out why a beef patty which took the resources to make like 20 veggie patties somehow costs less.

Annual Costs: (TOTALLY ESTIMATING HERE)

Product:	Vegan Burger (1/day)	Beef Burger (1/day)	Chicken Patty (1/day)
Retail Price:	$900	$700	$700
Animals Killed:	0	2	30
Water Used:	1400 gal	100000 gal	10000 gal
Land used:	1 acre (local)	100 acre (80% rainforest)	4 acre (80% rainforest)

Rows to add: medical cost, greenhouse gasses, disease/epidemic potential
Columns to add: milk/soymilk