So, the new semester is off to a great start – you’ve got the classes that you want, the teachers are easy and don’t seem to be prone to large amounts of homework, your roommate doesn’t snore and sleeps when you do and things are rosy!

You’re in college with the intention of making a difference when you finally graduate and head into the “real world.” What if I were to tell you that you can make a difference now and all you have to do is change the way you eat one day a week?

Last week, in the semester’s premier issue of The Pacer, there was a letter printed by a rather vocal vegetarian. I thought that the point was clear and one that needed to be explored a bit more.

Let’s put this in a way that I know everyone will understand – dollars and cents. Let’s say for the sake of argument that you spend $3 every day at McDonald’s or another restaurant on a hamburger, chicken sandwich, ribs or such.

Excluding weekends, this comes down to roughly $15 a week, and $60 a month, $720 a year for one person.

Now, let’s say that for some odd reason, you decide to cut out that sandwich – and all meat for one day a week. Still excluding weekends, that’s $3 not spent on meat, right?

I know what you are telling yourselves - $3 isn’t that much. We do the same math, starting with $3 a day. That equals $12 a month, $144 a year.

Now, imagine if one million people did that same thing. That would amount to over 144 million dollars every year NOT spent on meat.
Do you know how many heads of lettuce, stalks of corn, rows of beans and other foods could be planted and harvested for underdeveloped nations with $144,000,000?

Now, before the hate-mail starts pouring in, let me say that I still trek down to Burger King for my three-patty Stacker Combo so I can’t say that vegetarianism is the way for me, either.

What I can say is that I have sworn off meat two days out of the week, which usually leads into three and four days a week easily enough.

Why did I do this? The answer is simple – the math doesn’t lie and I truly believe the statistic I read on a Vegetarian web-site that said that if people in all industrialized countries were to cut their meat consumption by 10%, we could end world hunger.

Do I think that by not eating meat twice, three times, four times a week that I will end world hunger? No. As Blaise Pascal said, “We must learn our limits. We are all something, but none of us are everything.”

Because college is a place for new experiences and new concepts about the world we find ourselves in, I offer this little tidbit as a concept many have never been exposed to and not too many embrace. It is yours to take as you will.

I truly do believe that education of a thing changes perception of that thing and so, I seek only to educate.

We may not all have the ability to impart major change upon the world in which we live in but we can all, as I paraphrase Pascal, do something to change our own lives for the better – and isn’t that what it’s all about?