As discussed in an earlier post, eating meat (or non-veg foods) creates the new Karma for various entities in the food chain that needs repaying.

That means if someone eats meat in all three meals for a year, they accumulate 1000+ iterations of life/death cycles in that short time. Think how many iterations one will accumulate if they do this for their entire lives.

However, as emphasized in the above linked post, it is not as black and white as it sounds in the above sentence. 

In the matters of Karma, intentions matter more than actions themselves. For example, a soldier eating meat to aid their duties does not accumulate the additional cycles of life and death, as against those who eat to satisfy their cravings for taste.

The same applies to Vegetarians/Vegans as well. 

But, in their situation, things are less complicated, mainly because most plant-based food comes from fruits. For example, vegetables like tomatoes and beans are all fruits of respective plants; the same is the case with apples, bananas, etc, and the sorts of grains we eat.

Unlike meat, we can take fruits from plants without harming them. In fact, plants entice us (and other animals) to eat fruit by making them tasty so that we will eat the tasty part and throw away seeds, helping the plant species to grow. 

If we do not take the fruits from plants, they will get thrown out by the plants themselves. Therefore, most vegetarian/Vegan foods, on the virtue of being based on fruits, do not create any bad or good karma.

That said, there are some plant-based items for which one would either trouble or kill the plants. For example, the leafy vegetables, even though we need not uproot the plant, we need to trouble it. 

The same goes for root-based items like carrots and onions. In those cases, we need to uproot the plant, thus killing it. Most of the time, when we do this, plants would have lived almost all of their life. Nonetheless, those plants get killed.

Additionally, while raising their crop, farmers uproot unneeded plants from their farms to give crops a better chance of survival and growth. Those killed plants add additional Karma for anyone eating vegetarian food.

While it is not much of a problem in India, in many Western countries, milk production is an industry focusing on maximizing production rather than caring about animals, resulting in the mistreatment of cows and calves and creating additional Karma for milk consumers.

This way, in terms of generating new Karma, vegetarians/vegans are at far more advantage than their meat-eating counterparts, as they generate far less new Karma.

But having said that, it is not zero; vegetarians are also not fully protected in it.

So, the question is, what should we do to avoid creating any new Karma by eating food? Let’s cover that in an another post.