I am a meat lover. I don’t feel like I have had a proper meal if I haven’t had any meat and so my current challenge is proving to be a real battle for the mind.
“Avoiding meat and dairy is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth”
From the damaging land use, greenhouse gas emissions, fresh water usage and water and air pollution, animal food products are overwhelmingly bad for the environment.
Now I am not saying that I am going to be able to turn Vegan anytime soon, but I am definitely going to try to take more steps in that direction to at least ease my dietary impact on the world. Over the last three months I have therefore been exploring new meal options. We have had successes and failures but we are definitely making progress week by week. We are currently aiming for 1 vegetarian day, 2 fish days, 2 chicken/turkey days, 1 red meat day, and the last day is anything apart from red meat. (The guidance for starting to try to reduce our red meat intake is 1 burger a week or 1 steak a month which I think is actually quite do-able.)
I have found an article by the BBC particularly useful as you can see the impact of different foods. (eg I chose lamb burgers over beef burgers this weekend as I knew they were marginally better).
To break myself in easily I started off by changing the convenience food products that we use. After a few trials we now have vegetarian nuggets instead of chicken nuggets (the boys didn’t even notice) and we now mostly use vegetarian sausages (which the boys love), and we only have pork sausages very occasionally. I have tried a couple of meat free mince products in bolognaise and cottage pie and we tried some tofu the other week however my eldest just cried each time and made me promise never to make it again!
Now I do realise that there are lots of wonderful vegetarian and vegan recipes out there to try however I simply just don’t enjoy cooking (at all) and so here is where I am facing my biggest challenge. I have currently got 6 recipe books out from the library (I have had them 2 months now) however I am not even inspired by the pictures to want to try to cook them and so I am really struggling. (Trying to cut out milk and cheese as well as meat makes this extremely hard!)
I have however had a recent success with a recipe I found online for a spinach and tomato spaghetti dish (ignore the parmesan) which is very easy to make. My husband says it’s delicious (has never said that about my cooking before) and my eldest son has claimed it to be his favourite dinner ever?! My youngest picks out most of the spinach but does actually eat it. So I am feeling a little bit more inspired to try some more recipes, so please feel free to send me your favourite (easy to cook, not a million ingredients) recipes and I might just give them a try!
I know I have a long, long way to go, but for me this is a huge shift in behaviour which is definitely going to take some time to get used to in terms of learning to cook new recipes, not to mention telling my brain that I don’t need meat to have a proper meal. But as a source of inspiration, I didn’t like tomatoes for over 30 years and now I do. I also trained myself to like water instead of soft drinks when I was in my 20s, and so I do know that I can change my diet it is just going to take some time and willpower!
