By Bruce Friedrich

Gone are the days when vegetarians were served up a plate of iceberg lettuce and a dull-as-dishwater baked potato. With the growing variety of vegetarian faux meats like bacon and sausages - along with an ever-expanding variety of vegetarian cookbooks and restaurants - vegetarianism has taken the world by storm.

With World Vegetarian Week beginning on Monday, here without further ado are PETA's picks for the top 10 reasons to give vegetarian eating a try.

1. Helping Animals Also Helps the Global Poor

While there is ample and justified moral indignation about the diversion of 100 million tons of grain for biofuels, more than seven times as much (760 million tons) is fed to farmed animals so that people can eat meat. Is the

Humans must recover their place in nature. They will not be well nor their policies and systems of governance sane until they do. Humans must realize that ALL present economic, military and government systems today are based upon fallacies that are unhealthy for them and every other living thing.

If we want any natural world to exist, we must become a part of it rather than its destroyer by virtue of insisting upon being its exception. We must lose our vanity and recover our natural wisdom. And we MUST embrace the most fundamental truth about ourselves; we are human herbivore monkeys.

Our place was naturally rich. Now it is all but vanquished. But, if we hope to continue upon this planet and hope for any natural life to continue, we must

How's this for a timely quote: "(It) was the year I decided to find out why people were hungry in the world. The experts were telling us that the population problem was the cause of scarcity. The truth was, we were feeding a third of the world's grain to livestock, and with little return."

That was Frances Moore Lappe, author of "Diet for a Small Planet." The year was 1968.

Since then, meat consumption around the world has risen exponentially. As with our thirst for oil, Americans lead the way when it comes to chomping animal flesh, and by a long shot. As the public dialogue reels over the question of food vs. fuel, it's a

"Given that we sit atop the food chain, nothing preys on us so there's nothing to stop our growth."

This is simply a major fallacy of our very ecologically fallacious culture. There is NO ‘top' to the food chain!

In fact, evolutionary tendency is from carnivorous to omnivorous where we see some plant eating capabilities, to exclusive plant eating capabilities and then further specialization (such as the bovine specialized stomach) adding an ability to digest much more commonly available foodstuffs, grasses.

If one looks with an accurate ecological lens, one sees that ecology itself moves towards dietary specializations that can support great herds, meaning larger and larger population numbers... and it turns out, these greater numbers are