On Wednesday, January 26, vegetarian, environmental activist, and author Howard Lyman spoke to a packed room during a noontime lecture organized by the Caltech Vegetarian Club.

The event, held in the Winnett Lounge, was also sponsored by the Caltech Y, the Wellness Week Program, and ASCIT.

Lyman is the author of Mad Cowboy: Plain Truth from the Cattle Rancher Who Won't Eat Meat. A former fourth-generation cattle rancher from Montana, he is perhaps an unlikely advocate of an organic, plant-based diet. Yet few would deny his familiarity and understanding of the cattle and farming industry; and based on his nearly 40 years of experience in agriculture, he now states that current agricultural practice is not sustainable.

Citing the facts that 16 pounds of grain are required to produce 1 pound of beef and that the same amount of grain could feed 32 people per day if they ate the grain directly, Howard made the point that a diet centered on animal consumption is neither efficient nor environmentally sound.

Based on his years of research on the matter, Lyman asserted that people with a vegetarian diet have longer and healthier lives than those who do not. He makes the case for a plant-based diet based on health concerns. He stated that women who consume dairy products are seven times more likely to develop breast cancer than women who don't and that vegetarians are less than half as likely as non-vegetarians to develop heart disease.

Lyman rails against the modern agriculture industry practice of factory farming, in which animals are injected with antibiotics and hormones in an effort to increase yield. The dangers of this approach, according to Lyman, are legion. A 1999 study by researchers at the state Health Department in Minnesota and published in the New England Journal of Medicine offers strong evidence that humans contract drug-resistant bacteria from chickens treated with antibiotics on feedlots.

The practice of rendering, or feeding cows and other animals to cows, is of particular concern to Lyman. Lyman is an expert on food safety and mad cow disease and was invited by Oprah Winfrey to discuss food safety in America on an April 1996 show. There, he affirmed that practices which led to the outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE or mad cow disease) are still in place in America and that rendering only makes such an outbreak more likely: even one infected cow can place thousands of cows at risk through the rendering process. His remarks made Oprah swear off hamburgers on the spot.

As a result of his appearance and Oprah's remark, Lyman and Winfrey were sued by a group of Texas cattle ranchers under a Texas law which forbids anyone from "knowingly making false statements" about agricultural products. In 1998, Lyman and Winfrey won the suit in a Federal court in Amarillo, Texas, in the heart of cattle ranching country.

Lyman is the president of EarthSave International, a non-profit organization which "promotes food choices that are healthy for people and the planet." The organization was founded in 1988 by John Robbins, author of the book Diet for a New America.

As he told the jury in Amarillo, he stated again on Wednesday, "The thing I am most proud of is that no animal has to die for me to live."