Experiments are continuing, they’re interesting and good fun.
This time I got inspired by this Ted talk video from Graham Hill:
https://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/graham_hill_weekday_vegetarian.html
It’s a 4 minutes funny video, vision is very recommended 🙂
After that, I stepped into the real world of meat production and consumption: a world of which I heard about of but never investigated.
There’re a lot of shocking information around, basically the problems related with high meat production and consumption typical of our lifestyle can be summarize in:
– cattle produce greenhouse gases, so contributing to global warming (they say this is more impacting than all the vehicles put together)
– producing meat requires high demand of natural resources like water and to feed the animals soia has to be produced, to produce more soia more soil is needed, to have more soil more deforestation has to take place, and so on so forth in the chain of destruction
– modern animal farming techniques are just horrible, to produce more meat animals are grown in unnatural conditions, don’t have space to live and are feed with medicines and other shit to prevent diseases
– eating too much meat is bad for the health
To know more about the topic, this is the best documentary I found:
Meat The Truth (https://www.meatthetruth.nl)
It’s available on Youtube, first part is at the link below:
After knowing this, I really thought that reducing my meat consumption was a really good idea, and also something very simple to do.
It wasn’t uncommon for me to eat meat, ham or salami everyday, so I immediately liked the concept of becoming a weekday vegetarian.
Please don’t tell me that to be coherent then to fight global warming I also have to stop driving my motorbike and my van, and stop taking planes.
While these actions are also impacting, they’re much more difficult decision to take than become a weekday vegetarian.
Instead, I invite you to become a weekday vegetarian too, or at least to think and reduce your meat consumption, knowing that this will have a more positive effect than me stopping driving my vehicles and living a miserable life 🙂
Anyway, I did the experiment in June and for the whole month I tried to eat meat only on the weekends.
How did it go?
Well, I discover the beauty of living without buying any meat at the supermarket.
Vegetables are good, and there are very nice options around.
My new favourite dishes are caprese salade, mixed salade and grilled vegetables 🙂
And having to travel for work and staying in good hotels, I always have restaurants with vegetarian options available.
And also, buying vegetables is cheaper!!
I didn’t stick to the schedule very well: a Thursday evening I ended up in an Argentinian restaurant with some colleagues and couldn’t avoid to have a steak, ops! 😛
But on the other hand, getting used to avoid meat lead me to often avoid meat in weekends too.
They say that if you do something for 30 days, it will became an habit.
So here I am, almost completing my second month as weekday vegetarian, and still loving the idea of the positive impact that this brings.
The lessons I learned are:
1) we don’t need to eat animals, really, try it yourself
2) a consumer we have a lot of power… and responsibilities too
I love TED for videos just like Graham Hill’s. Short, intelligent and unpatronizing, while at the same time really inspiring you. His ‘Weekday Vegetarian’ idea makes such sense on every level; I hope the experiments going well for you and I’ll be following your progress as I’d really like to give the idea a go myself.
Some of my favorite meals have been (unknowingly!) vegetarian, but I’m not so inventive when it comes to vegetarian cooking at home. I think my own ‘Weekday Vegetarian’ experiment will start with a good vegetarian cookbook! Any suggestions?
Hi Tammy,
nice to have you here, I saw you’re a kite surfer too so there’s more in common than TED here! 🙂
I definitively recommend to give a try yourself with the “weekday veggie” approach, I just pay more attention to what I eat now… and I discovered that there are less chances to get disappointed ordering vegetarian dishes in restaurants!
I’m travelling a lot now so most of the time I’m in restaurants with international cousine, where nowadays I’m pleased to see vegetarian options available.
But to be honest, I haven’t been a truly weekday veggie.
I eat meat sometime in weekdays, but I made it up in weekends, and in general I’m not that strict but as I said I think more what I’m eating.
I don’t have suggestions about cookbook, but I was checking this out:
https://www.vegcooking.com/
let me know how your experiment will go! (need to find a new experiment to start btw!)