I gave up eating beef a few weeks ago, after being uncomfortably confronted with a pretty harsh truth during a class of mine.

Agribusiness is a huge contributor to our changing climate. If I'm going to call myself an environmentalist, I can't, in good conscious, eat beef.

Hell, I shouldn't be eating any meat or animal products, but I'm not quite there. Maybe one day.

Producing beef for human consumption involves a lot of water and a lot of feed. We spend food to grow our food -- it's essentially a waste. According to the United States Geological Survey, it takes over 400 gallons of water to produce a single hamburger.

The feed that's given to cows, the antibiotics that are pumped into beef and the carbon footprint of transporting the meat are all additional costs to eating cow meat.

(Also, cow farts are methane, and methane is a greenhouse gas, too. But that's not the main point.)

The main point is that we waste so much just so that we can produce beef that is cheap for consumers.

So I gave it up. I never liked the taste that much, (though the taste of a good steak is going to be hard to forget) and red meat (especially beef) just isn't good for you. Especially not in the form of a fast-food, salty, greasy, suspiciously-cheap bacon cheeseburger.

I slipped a few times, in the beginning. If my roommates made food that had beef, or if I had food that I had prepared before I decided to cut it out of my diet....I caved.

But I'm done. No more beef. Soon we'll cut out all red meat. I'm not sure what comes after that.