According to this, since I eat neither shellfish nor fish, I'm saving ~370 animals a year.

That being said, sorry, I will still be eating meat. I do need to try and eat less of it, if only for my own health.

I have a pretty deep distaste - no pun intended - for moralizing food. Its a cheap way of making a group of people feel bad without actually giving them a good reason to change their behavior. The cruel, honest truth of the matter is that if we were all vegetarians somebody down the line is still suffering. Welcome to living in a wealthy country. Our wealth is derived from other people's suffering, and that won't change until we suddenly have more resources or less population.

If you eat soybeans you are contributing passively to the destruction of the rainforest. If you eat Quinoa - a very healthy grain by the way, its really great - you are robbing much of the Andes of its grain, since Quinoa has become a large export to the United States in the health food boom that's been happening recently. Eat any vegetables that aren't locally grown? Let's go out on a very stable limb here - its probably from Latin America and its probably part of an exploitative farm.

If we all ate locally we would soon be out of food - local farms do not have the capacity to serve areas. Farms by my town would have to provide food for over 16,000 people, and do it every day. And that's just one town.

Vegetarianism, veganism, doesn't matter in the end. Something suffers, whether its a cow or a chicken or a farmer or a worker. Someone down the line gets screwed, and if they aren't then you're the one getting it. The only way to fix it is to eat less, and let's be honest, especially in the U.S., we eat way too much.