Our view: why am I trying to eat less meat?
You may already know from my other post that I used to be a vegetarian. I decided to stop eating meat altogether when I was 15 and it lasted 2 years. Since then I’ve not returned to being a veggie, but I have decided to reduce the amount of meat I consume.
The ‘flexitarian’ diet has become increasingly popular since the term was first coined in the mid-90s. This diet involves following a plant-based diet as much as possible without completely eliminating meat, and has been popularised by Paul McCartney and his family. The McCartney’s are also in part responsible for the number of people taking part in meat-free Mondays, with people foregoing meat for one day a week.
The reason I eat less meat is because I don’t always enjoy the taste and usually prefer Quorn, and also because I know that with reduced meat consumption comes a lot of different benefits.
The next two biggest benefits of eating less meat for me are the cost and the environmental benefit.
Meat is expensive, and as a student living on a smaller budget it has really helped me to save money by not buying meat and instead opting for vegetables in my shopping trolley. It’s much cheaper to make a vegetable curry rather than a chicken curry, simply because you can buy a number of vegetables for the same price of a small chicken breast at the supermarket. As someone who isn’t too fussed about the taste of meat, substituting it for vegetables is a great option for me and I definitely prefer it in terms of both taste and cost.
I also really appreciate the environmental benefit of eating less meat. The average British person consumes 11,000 animals in their lifetime, and each animal requires land, food, fuel and water before it reaches our plates. Not only this, but in 2006 the UN calculated that animals bred purely for meat are responsible for around 18% of global climate change emissions. These emissions come from the animals themselves and the animal manure, from the energy needed to harvest the crops that feed the animals, from the oil it takes to transport the meat worldwide, and from the electricity it takes to keep the meat cool and to then cook it.
I don’t believe that the answer is for everybody to suddenly become vegetarian. That’s not exactly feasible. But, I do think that if everybody looked into the facts behind the meat industry, and saw how reducing meat in our diets can benefit us, then a lot more people would be inclined to try a more ‘flexitarian’ diet, and the benefits of the vast majority of people consciously eating less meat would seriously change the negative effects of this industry.
