Adults are deserting meat and fish at the rate of about 30,000 a week, a survey by the Vegetarian Society claimed yesterday.
The society said that an estimated 3.6 million people over the age of 11, or 7 per cent of the population, now described themselves as vegetarians, and that a further 4.6 million people avoided red meat, such as beef, pork and lamb, but still ate fish and chicken.
The claims have been dismissed by the Meat and Livestock Commission, which says that non-meat-eaters account for no more than 2 per cent of the population. Beef consumption, it says, is down 8 per cent on a decade ago but pork, lamb and poultry are being eaten in greater quantities.
The Vegetarian Society's findings were released at the launch of its first national campaign aimed at adults. Juliet Gellatley, campaigns director, said that the society wanted to make more people aware of meat-eating's destructive impact on the environment and its role in aggravating food shortages in developing countries, as well as to promote the benefits of a vegetarian diet for human health and animal welfare.
She said that an area of rainforest the size of Britain was destroyed every week to provide land for cattle ranching and the manufacture of hamburgers. The world's cattle also ate enough food to meet the calorific needs of almost twice the world's human population and farm animals drank 80 per cent of all water supplies.
"Our demand for animal feed in the West has meant that many Third World countries are forced to grow food for export rather than for feeding their own people. Very often this trade is a condition of Third World aid. We must act now to reverse this cycle of destruction and deprivation," she said.
The society's survey, carried out by Bradford university and based on interviews with 942 adults and 2,651 children aged from 11 to 18, claims that there are 1.5 million more vegetarians (including those eating animal products such as eggs and milk) than in a Gallup survey a year ago.
One in ten women is a vegetarian and female adults are more than twice as likely than men to be vegetarians. Three in four vegetarians said that they had stopped eating meat and fish because of concern with the way animals were reared and slaughtered. Vegetarianism was found to be lowest in Scotland, at just 2 per cent.
One of vegetarianism's most publicised recent converts, Richard Lacey, professor of microbiology at Leeds university, said that he and his family had gradually stopped eating meat over the past three years because of his concern that the "mad cow" disease, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), could pass to humans. The risk had been played down by the government, he said.
The disease was grounds on its own for becoming a vegetarian. He said that there was a 60 per cent chance that the first BSE-caused cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Dementia, the human form of spongiform encephalopathy, would start to appear "in about 1996, with a peak from 2006 to 2016".
He also claimed that animals and poultry were responsible for 95 per cent of food poisoning incidents, whereas poisoning caused by vegetable matter was extremely rare. This was because the micro-organisms and bacteria best adapted to humans also flourished in other mammals, poultry and cold-blooded vertebrates.
