What is a Vegetarian?

A vegetarian is a person who abstains from eating meat, fish or poultry. There are several subcategories of vegetarians.

Lacto-Ova vegetarians do not eat meat, fish or poultry but do eat eggs and dairy.

Lacto vegetarians do not eat meat, fish, poultry or eggs, but do eat dairy. Most of Amy's products are lacto vegetarian.

Pure Veg or Vegans do not eat any animal products, including dairy and sometimes honey. Amy's has several suitable dishes that are vegan.

Amy's - A Vegetarian Company

Our company is deeply committed to producing and selling great tasting vegetarian food. This is not a 'marketing gimmick’ with us; rather it's a reflection of who we are and how we live. Amy's is a family business, and we are a vegetarian family.

Amy is a third generation vegetarian who has never eaten any sort of meat in her life. Amy's Grandfather was the first to become a vegetarian in 1968. Her mother, Rachel, became a vegetarian at 16 when she realized that the lamb chop she was eating was once a live lamb. When she and her brother Joel stopped eating meat as teenagers, their mother was afraid they would get sick and die from malnutrition. They didn't, and she soon joined them in following a meatless diet. This wasn't as easy to do in the 70's as it is in the 21st century.

Before Amy's Kitchen was set up in 1988, there were no convenient frozen meals in the marketplace that vegetarians could eat. Restaurants offered not much more than cheese sandwiches, salads and baked potatoes. Vegetarian airline and train travelers usually had to bring their own food.

Things have changed. Nowadays, all natural food stores and most supermarkets and grocery stores carry large selections of vegetarian frozen and grocery items suitable for vegetarians. Restaurants often have at least one vegetarian dish on the menu and airlines have several choices. (Continental Airlines and Amtrak even offer some Amy's Kitchen products.)

Wasted Resources
Source: GoVeg.com

Raising animals for food requires massive amounts of land, food, energy, and water and contributes to animal suffering.

Water
Between watering the crops that farmed animals eat, providing drinking water for billions of animals each year, and cleaning away the filth in factory farms, transport trucks, and slaughterhouses, the farmed animal industry places a serious strain on our water supply. Nearly half of all the water used in the United States goes to raising animals for food.

It takes 5,000 gallons of water to produce 1 pound of meat, while growing 1 pound of wheat only requires 25 gallons. A totally vegetarian diet requires only 300 gallons of water per day, while a meat-eating diet requires more than 4,000 gallons of water per day. You save more water by not eating a pound of beef than you do by not showering for an entire year.

While millions of people across the globe are faced with droughts and water shortages, much of the world's water supply is quietly being diverted to animal agriculture. As the Western diet spreads to the rest of the world, even desert nations in Africa and the Middle East are pouring what little water they have into meat production.

It is clear that raising animals for food puts a tremendous strain on our already limited water supply, and water is used much more efficiently when it goes toward producing crops for human consumption.

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>> Read more about the effects of meat eating on the environment.