Veggie Challenge 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!