No Meat Challenge – The Throwdown
More of this please!
Just a quick one today to set out the rules of the “No Meat” Challenge.
You will have probably noticed the blatant use of the speech marks surrounding the no meat there! As I have alluded to in my previous post, I don’t think going 30 days without any meat is feasible for me right now, the reasons for this being:
- I have two weddings, a weekend away for the father-in-law’s birthday, and Easter at my Mum’s. I’ve already ordered meat based courses for the weddings and it will be hard to avoid meat altogether on the other two occasions (ok, I admit it, I just know I won’t be able to resist). For this reason it seems silly to set up a challenge with such strict rules that I know I will fail.
- I realised on Monday night that I kinda sprung this one on Mrs TFS. Seeing as we eat most of our evening meals together, this was a bit mean and I should have given more notice (I know what you’re thinking… read the frigging blog, right? 🙂 I do generally tell her what I am up to on here but she doesn’t read most of it, as scandalous as that sounds). The alternative would obviously be to cook two different dinners each night which we are both pretty dead against, so we agreed to compromise instead.
The point of the challenge when I originally thought about it was to reduce our (my) meat consumption, I never planned on going veggie full-time (although you never know what life changes these things can inspire) so having a reduced meat challenge still seems like a worthy challenge to embark upon. Here are the rules we agreed on, so Mrs TFS will be fully joining me on this one:
- Only one meal containing meat allowed per day (This allows us to enjoy the wedding meals fully, just need to make sure we don’t have a fry up for breakfast the same morning!)
- We will also cook 3 veggie evening meals per week, so will have 3 full veggie days
- We are still allowed to eat cheese, milk, eggs.
This is still a significant cut back from the average carnivorous consumer and when you consider you can save more water by not eating a pound of beef than you do by not showering for an entire year, as well as all the other positive benefits of cutting back, I think it is still a challenge worth it’s salt. I always think along the lines of… “If everyone did this, would the results be significant?” and the answer in this case is surely an unequivocal yes.
So who’s up for joining me? You don’t have to sign up for it right now but hopefully this challenge will provide you with some food for thought (pun not to be pardoned, it was that bad) and hopefully get people questioning their meat intake, and the health and environmental benefits of cutting down. The side benefit is of course that your wallet will thank you for it as well, as veggie dishes are generally a lot cheaper than meat based ones! Everyone’s a winner.
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Foot note: I’ll be posting up some of the veggie dishes that we cook over the month as well of course, but you could do worse than starting with the ultimate omelette recipe or some egg fried rice if you wanted to try a couple out straight away!
Discussion (18) ¬
I live a partial veg existance already. My wife is veggie and as a result we’re a meat free household and have been for about 9 years. The only meat I have is when eating out.
I think the biggest challenge you’ll face is cooking interesting/satisfying meals. It’s very easy to fall in to the trap of eating pasta every night and just ending up on a carb heavy diet. For advice i’d take a good look at both Italian and Indian cuisine as in my opinion they both make being a veggie very easy if cooked correctly.
Being a partial veg for so long has in fact made me much more picky about the meat I do eat. I like to know it is good quality and cooked well if i’m going to eat it.
Good luck and enjoy the challenge!
I agree about the traps of the carb heavy diet and that is something I don’t want to fall into! I get bored of pasta very quickly but I think I could eat rice practically every day for dinner as long as it has some spice (and obviously some veggies) in it. I love Indian food and made a vegetable curry not so long ago and I have to say I didn’t really miss the meat too much in it.
Thanks!
You’ll do fine as long as you do what UTMT espouses: cook interesting meals. When I met my wife, she was vegetarian and wouldn’t marry a non-vegetarian. Well, she’s my wife, so now I’m vegetarian. Interestingly enough, now I’m the cook. There are a couple of great websites out there. We’ve been enjoying honestcooking.com. Also, the book “Plenty” by Yotam Ottolenghi is a great place to start.
I have actually gotten to the point that I no longer miss meat (we’ve been married 9 years, so don’t expect it overnight).
Thanks for the recomendation Liam, I’ll check out that website.
I don’t think I’ll have too much trouble keeping it interesting with all the free recipes available out there nowadays, and am looking forward to trying lots of nice new things. Did a veggie curry tonight, it was very nice!
Its a good challenge to take on, TFS.
I tried to go vegan for a month last year – but unfortunately didnt last the whole month. I lasted about 3 weeks, which I guess isnt as bad. The biggest problem I found was that it needed a lot of planning-ahead to get the meals streamlined.
Good luck with your challenge.
regards
Is that stat about a pound of beef saving more water than a year’s worth of showers true?
Something I should really think about. It’s mind boggling.
Well I read it on the internet so it must be true… hah 🙂
To be fair it could be inaccurate at best but I’ve been reading that treehugger.com website all week and it all the articles I’ve read look to be well researched and they cite studies and so on. Obviously, they have an agenda and might be slightly biased, but it’s clearly a good agenda to have so I’m not arguing with them either way.
Good for you! I don’t think I could ever pull off a meat free month. I mean I could probably do it, but Mrs. Root of Good could not. We don’t eat a ton of meat, and try to make grains and veggies a key part of each meal, but there’s usually meat in whatever we are eating. And here in the states, meat is pretty cheap (often not a whole lot more than fresh veggies). So the monetary savings would be limited unless we went to a beans and rice diet and kept the fresh veggies to a minimum.
Beans and rice with limited veggies doesn’t sound like the way to go just to save a few bob ay Justin, I like my food way too much for that! I can’t ever see myself going full time vegetarian but you never know. I think it’s fair to say that us humans as a whole eat far too much meat than we should or need to, in the Western world at least. I think this challenge will help me live a bit more intentionally when it comes to eating meat.
Stretching out meat meals by adding loads of veggies is a strategy that both employ regularly, and fully endorse in it’s scrumptiousness adding abilities to any meal!
I kind of eat this diet permanently…. I’m not a vegetarian, though was in the past, but I haven’t eaten red meat since I was a teenager. My good lady Mrs LCIL is an omnivore, but only really eats meat when we eat out.
Shopping each week tends to include 1 chicken or chicken thigh/legs, & 1 purchase of seafood of some sort. So it’s pretty much 1 meal of each & then vegetarian on the other days. We cook from scratch pretty much all the time, such is the life of the down-shifted – we have the time to do this!
I also bake bread every week…. a simple pleasure if you have the time between blog reading!
That’s great LCIL! I have recently had a few forays into home made bread making and have been pretty pleased with the results, I think it’s something I will start doing more often for sure.
When I started basic budgeting a few years back, I cut down on my meat-eating at home and still tend to have 3 meat-free days a week on average. If I do eat meat, I cut down on the size of the portions, using more veg. I do find though that when I’m out with friends, I nearly always go for the meat (steak!) option – it’s a treat after all!
Good luck with this challenge – I tend to think it’s harder for blokes to give up meat than women!
Yea that’s a good way of doing things weenie! Eating out should be a real treat and that makes it even more so. I don’t like paying through the nose for something that I would normally eat at home (I hate getting pasta out, for example), otherwise I just think what is the point and I could have just made this myself for 1/10th of the price 🙂
Thanks! I’m doing better than Mrs TFS so far so not sure that is true, it’s probably more down to the individual circumstances (she doesn’t have the omnipresent glare of any blog readers watching for her to slip up, for a start 🙂 )
Good luck with this! It is a great challenge and something I’ve been thinking about. At the moment though I am up for reducing my meat intake, but not cutting it out entirely as the rest of my family wouldn’t want to and like you I prefer not to cook separate meals if I can help it…
Thanks Zoe!
Cooking separate meals is such a pain! I had meat with breakfast this morning and Mrs TFS did not, so we ended up cooking two separate curries this evening. The kitchen looks like a bomb has hit it at the moment!
I’ve been attempting one day per week… There’s a really good vegan restaurant nearby where I frequent often for lunch…
I have been vegan before in the past. I think the best I ever did was about six month stretch… My meals weren’t that interesting, which was the hardest part.
Good luck!
Thanks FI!
Not sure I could ever go fully Vegan, 6 months is a cracking effort!