Why I'm Sticking To Being Veggie...Despite Craving A Steak

Photo by Anna Pelzer on Unsplash

My husband has been vegetarian now for about three years following a trip to China. I don’t mean to try and blame everything on China, but after three weeks trying to decipher exactly what meat they were serving he decided that it was best to stay away from meat altogether. The habit stuck and now, his non-meat, veggie-chomping ways have finally rubbed off on me.

I’m not an obvious vegetarian. I’ve never met a steak or a burger that I didn’t devour in three bites and I have been known to roll my eyes when I find out a dinner guest is veggie. Roast dinners are my favourite meal in the whole world and I’ve always believed that tofu and Quorn are the work of the devil himself. I know, I know…I can be a dick. But, I have been taught the error of my ways - not about the steak or the burger - I still think those are delicious and miss them something chronic, but this is nothing to do with what I’m putting in my body. It’s about the planet.

I watched Gamechangers at the end of last year and while there’s a tonne of controversy surrounding the ‘science’ in that film regarding veganism and plant-based diets specifically, there were a few things that resonated with me. Mainly though, I couldn’t believe the effect that meat farming was having on the planet. We are so fastidious about other environmental habits - recycling, ethical and sustainable shopping, reducing use of the car etc - but it hadn’t really occurred to me that farming the meat I was throwing down my gullet was causing serious damage to the planet.

According to Damien Carrington, environment editor at The Guardian, avoiding meat and dairy is the single biggest way to reduce your impact on the earth. While I’m using oat milk where I can, I have yet to be able to ditch dairy completely - baby steps and all that. But, when meat and dairy are providing 18% of our calories and taking up 83% of farmland, we have to wonder whether that’s an imbalance that we can get away with for very long. If the emergence of covid-19 has taught me anything, it’s that nature has a way of righting itself and perhaps, reducing our impact on the earth, is one of the first things we can reassess beyond this current situation.

It doesn’t just have environmental benefits. I’ve also discovered some physical benefits. This may be an overshare but the haemorrhoids I used to get monthly are a thing of the past, my poos sink rather than float (apparently that’s a thing that it took me 37 years to discover), my farts don’t smell nearly as toxic, I don’t get nearly as bloated and I’ve finally got used to eating tofu.

Things that being vegetarian hasn’t helped:

1. I didn’t lose any weight mostly because chocolate and wine aren’t meat.

2. I’m still a miserable cow just before my period.

3. I still have wrinkles and look every minute of my 38 years.

4. I still crave a Big Mac Meal on a hangover.

5. I still crave a kebab when I’m pissed

6. Fake bacon is wrong on all levels but I have found that with enough herbs and spices, tofu doesn’t always taste like complete shit.

So, while I’m not here to tell you what to do, I am here to say that reducing our impact on the planet has to be a priority right now. You don’t have to give up meat and dairy entirely, but even making small reductions in their use can have a huge impact if we all do it.