1. You don't need meat to thrive; it's simply a taste. With that taste comes dietary cholesterol and heart disease, cancer, choline, TMAO, carnitine, obesity and type-2 diabetes, bio-accumulated pollutants and toxins, and poisonous heavy metals.
2. See point one.

Ask a paleoanthropologist and they'll tell you that we have no biological adaptations to eating meat, in our guts or elsewhere. Biologically speaking we have the digestive systems of frugivores. Our evolutionary ancestors simply had to reach reproductive age, which is why they ate almost anything that was available to them. I wouldn't imitate the diet of peoples with average lifespans of the mid-to-late teens though. Better to stick to the advice of nutritional scientists and eliminate or strictly limit your meat, dairy, fish, and egg intake.

Agreed. And if the industry themselves give 20% as their number for greenhouse emissions, you know it's a hell of a lot worse than that. I'm a vegan for health and environmental concerns as well.

The problem is indeed growing cows for food, no matter how it's done. If people stop eating meat and instead ate the vegetables fed to the animals, the efficiency of the food supply increases 10 to 40 fold (depending on who's number you use). A pound of beef takes 10 to 40 pounds of feed, an absurd amount of fresh water, a huge expanse of land, countless antibiotics, and the transportation of elements within the system (feed to cows, cows to processing plants, etc). Why not just skip the middlemen and give humans the vastly-more-efficient feed?

What incentive does big ag have to do anything to reduce their environmental footprint? They have a get-out-of-jail-free card for emissions, fresh water usage and water system pollution, food poisoning, antibiotics abuse, employee and animal abuse, and land degradation. They're richly subsidized to be the world's greatest pollution offenders.

My friends live here.

Hopefully they'll treat us better than we treat lower life-forms. Especially if we happen to taste good to them.

Could you say that 5,300 makes it a conspiracy? The numbers are quite staggering and I don't see how it amounts to a mere $5 million in damages to the victims.

Is there any way to check if you were one of the Wells Fargo customers they screwed over? Also, why did they only pay back $5 million to their compromised customers?

He just wants to feel wanted.

Was it a tree, or more like a branching bush?

She must have had a heart attack on the way down.

You can absolutely survive on a fully vegan diet, and humans have been doing it for millions of years. The American Dietetic Association released a statement to this effect. They are the United States' largest organization of food and nutrition professionals, and represents over 100,000 credentialed practitioners — registered dietitian nutritionists, dietetic technicians, registered, and other dietetics professionals holding undergraduate and advanced degrees in nutrition and dietetics.
It is the position of the American Dietetic Association that appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes. A vegetarian diet is defined as one that does not include meat (including fowl) or seafood, or products containing those foods.
http://www.vrg.org/nutrition/2009_ADA_position_paper.pdf

As for the article you posted. You need to look at the source of your information before jumping to conclusions. Nina Planck (who wrote that NY times article), like most journalistic writers, has several financial ulterior motives for attacking vegans. For every vegan feeding their baby apple cider and soy milk there are thousand equally moronic meat eaters being jailed for the neglect of their children. Does that mean anything about eating meat, or just neglect in general?

From Nina Planck's own website and wikipedia page:
-Ms. Planck‘s London Farmers‘ Markets sell, among other things, “organic & outdoor reared meat, game in season, dairy“ and fish.
-Her website invites browsers to “Learn why butter and lard are good for you and corn oil and soy milk are not.
-She lives in New York City with Robert Kaufelt, proprietor of Murray's Cheese Store
-In 2003, she returned to the United States as the director of the New York Greenmarket program; she was dismissed after six months:

Also, there are an estimated 100 million vegetarians in the world ranging from strict vegans to lacto-ovo-pescatarians and everything in between. In every single large-scale non-industry funded nutritional study, vegans always exhibit the lowest levels of chronic lifestyle disease such as cancer and atherosclerosis. They also have the longest life-spans worldwide. Look in to the traditional Okinawans and the Adventists for a start.

You honestly don't know what an herbivore is?.... I mean, I'd love to talk about frugivores (every one of our closest relatives) and ruminants but if you can't wrap your mind around one of the most basic concepts in all of biology, it's going to be difficult.

The longest population-based life expectancy ever observed is in the traditional Okinawans, which were almost entirely vegan. The longest life expectancy is the Americans are the Adventists, who range from vegan to vegetarian. Both groups also show an almost complete lack of modern Western lifestyle diseases like atherosclerosis, cancer (except those vegetarian Adventists eating dairy and egss), and autoimmune disease.

Shining examples of the health benefits of avoiding meat, not only for a longer life, but also a higher quality of health overall. Watch Forks Over Knives for more health benefits: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt15...

That is a very linear view of the development of our species and reads like an amateur paper for Anthropology 100. You've combined an outdated view of cultural evolution with and outdated model of biological adaptation and reached a 1950/1960's style conclusion. Garbage in, garbage out.

My suggestion is for you to look into modern studies of: ancient coprolite analysis, dental calculus analysis, studies of the consumption of starches like tubers, bone chemistry, the "meat made us human" myth, "man the hunter" myth, and the almost 50 years of critiques of linear evolution models in anthropology.