Can Meat Lovers Live with a Little Less…Meat?

Experimenting with the Veggie Lifestyle

Welcome back to Tom's Plan B, where I experiment with new lifestyles and set the foundation for a way forward. In this entry, I wanted to challenge myself and my family to experiment with a veggie lifestyle for seven weeks.

Now, I love meat, and so do my parents, but we wanted to try eating less meat for a few reasons. More and more people are choosing to eat less meat because they realize the positive impact that it can have on the environment. The production of plant-based foods is more sustainable, requires fewer resources, and generates fewer greenhouse gases. But I also wanted to see if we meat lovers could actually live with a little less meat. So, we set some rules for the challenge.

The Rules

We added one day a week of eating veggie to our diet, and by the seventh week, we were fully vegetarian, including breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks. We did this gradually to promote new habits and make the transition a little less hard for my parents. We left out the vegan diet for the time being. Mind you, my parents - especially my dad - love the Flemish cuisine. So going without animal products might have been too big of a stretch to get them started. I’ll keep that for another challenge!

Exploring New Cuisines

I love to cook, and for me, cooking is a sense of creativity. So, I was excited to try new foods, recipes, and ingredients. However, a typical Flemish dish is meat, potatoes, and vegetables. The most common thing people do here when they try to go vegetarian is just replace the meat with a plant-based protein, usually something that we in the family like to call veggie meat. But for this challenge, I wanted to explore different cuisines like Asian and Mediterranean.

We started off easy, and by the first few weeks, it was really easy to get into the groove. We experimented with new dishes and tried out some fake meats to see if we liked them or not. But by week four, I started to get into some troubles with something I hadn't considered at all. My breakfast routine was ingrained in me, and I missed my piece of chicken cold cuts in the morning.

Challenges… and Solutions

Since we started to struggle with a few little things, it was time to call in some help. I got on a call with my friends @laurafromthedesert & @inesgoovaertsphotography, two eco creators who have been mainly vegetarian for the past few years. This is what they had to say:

Laura from the desert
Food is something so emotional and nostalgic; we link it to certain moments in our lives. I grew up in the United States, where I had a lot of egg biscuit bacon breakfasts. Bacon was my all-time favorite food. But I have to say that the fake meats did really help me transition. My guilty pleasure was smoked salmon, but it was actually very easy to quit buying meat and then quit eating it.

Ines Goovaerts
The only thing that was a bit challenging was when I was a tour guide and came to places and cultures where being a vegetarian just doesn't exist. Then, I learned to make my own decisions when I'm at home and when I go out and travel and meet different cultures. It's a balance that I'm trying to find for myself and for the cultures that are still on this planet as well.

So… Now what?

What I learned from that conversation and my experiences in the challenge is this; The best veggie or vegan dishes are where flavors and textures intertwine. It’s about finding new dishes and habits that can help replace some of the old ones.
We would normally have meat at least once a day, but now we're incorporating more veggies into our meals and we're finding that we don't even miss the meat that much. Plus, we're discovering new recipes and ingredients that we wouldn't have tried before.

One thing that has surprised us is how affordable it is to eat vegetarian. This has been a pleasant surprise and a great incentive to keep going with our veggie challenge. Especially with food costs rising all over the world.

Overall, this challenge has been a positive experience for our family. We've learned that we can enjoy a variety of delicious and satisfying meals without relying on meat, and we've also discovered that eating vegetarian can be better for our health, our wallet, and the environment. Of course, we're not saying that we'll never eat meat again, but we're definitely more conscious of our consumption and we plan to continue incorporating vegetarian meals into our diet. And that’s also the conclusion to the experiment… We don’t need millions of people to stop eating meat. But reducing the intake already goes a long way.

From now on I am personally trying to stick to a flexitarian diet.

If you're thinking about trying a veggie challenge yourself, we encourage you to give it a shot. It may be a bit challenging at first, but the rewards are definitely worth it. Who knows, you may even discover some new favorite foods along the way.
Definitely check out the video to see what my dad had to say about this whole challenge!