It’s National Vegetarian Week: Here’s how being veggie can reduce your impact on the planet

Eating meat has a huge impact on the planet and choosing to decrease your meat intake even just slightly can help you do your bit to help. The global production of meat contributes to wide scale deforestation, water wastage, biodiversity loss, and greenhouse gas emissions. These are all factors which contribute to climate change.

It’s estimated there are 1.5 billion vegetarians worldwide, including celebrities such as Paul McCartney, John Bishop, and Amanda Holden. However, you don’t have to completely remove meat from your diet to make an impact. Here’s some ways that you can reduce your meat consumption and help the planet.

Start Meat-Free Monday

Cutting down on meat once a week is a small change that can make a big impact. Taking part in Meat-Free Monday once a week can help to introduce a reduction in meat into your routine when you aren’t able to fully cut it out.

Introduce a flexitarian diet

Being flexitarian can create the results of a vegetarian diet without the full commitment to being meat-free. Flexitarians follow a mainly vegetarian or vegan diet with the occasional consumption of meat. It’s a more casual version of decreasing your meat intake that doesn’t require strict commitment to a specific dietary choice.

Try out some meat alternatives

With the huge increase of vegetarian and vegan diets, meat replacements are better than they have ever been. Quorn, THIS, Linda McCartney, and Beyond, all create products with similar taste and texture to meat products to help those who wish to reduce their consumption to replace it with something similar. There’s now a huge range of alternatives that are stocked in most supermarkets that may help you to make the switch.

Buy a vegetarian cookbook

If eating meat with every meal has always been the case for you then educating yourself on some new vegetarian recipes might be all it takes to reduce your intake. Buying a vegetarian cookbook, or researching recipes online can improve your cooking skills, help the planet, and you may even find a new favourite meal.