The Adventure of the Vegetarian Conversion

In which I make a lifestyle change...

Summer 2022. I walk past the local park, a slice of British recreation ground that currently looks like it is auditioning for the Australian Outback. Everywhere is dusty and brown rather than the vibrant green it should be at this time of year. I cross over the river and note that I've never seen it with so little water in. Every now and then there'd be a plume of smoke in the distance as another local heathland caught fire in the tinder dry conditions. 

This summer has been unlike any I've ever experienced. In the UK you expect it to be raining constantly but here at least we went over two months where no recordable rain fell. 2018 was one of the hottest summers ever and it's thought that the chances of the UK experiencing a summer as hot or even hotter than 2018 is now one in ten. Due to the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that's about thirty times more likely than it was before the industrial revolution. Some scenarios depict that by the 2050s we could be experiencing summers like this as often as every other year. 

None of this is particularly new but living through the hottest summer of all time does make you pause. I am not someone who likes the heat and have found it unpleasant but I can only imagine how bad things could get if this happens regularly. It feels perfectly plausible that we could reach a point where no water comes out of the taps at times. 

I think my carbon footprint is probably quite a bit lower than the average person in the UK. I rarely fly and I don't drive very much- my mileage for the last year was under 2,000 miles. But I was tucking into yet another meat feast pizza one evening when I suddenly felt a wave of guilt. My carbon footprint may well be lower than many people's but it was probably still a lot higher than it needed to be. 

I am now a vegetarian. I've always thought that being a massive carnivore this would never happen but here we are. Of all greenhouse gas emissions from the production of food, meat accounts for 57% of it. Beef alone accounts for 25% of all emissions from food production. Therefore cutting out meat is a straightforward way to cut my personal carbon footprint. To be honest, I've never been entirely comfortable with farming and killing animals for food but I haven't had the push until now. 

There is of course the option of going vegan- my brother runs a vegan café so it runs in the family. This feels too big a step, not least because cheese and chocolate are some of my favourtie things and trying to find vegan versions all the time would just not be the same. I don't really drink milk nor eat eggs so I'm only consuming these as part of other foods- I'm probably not eating that much produce derived from animals anyway. I also find that being vegan is more complicated. Many vegans won't eat honey because it is produced by bees. Yet nearly all vegans will eat avocados and other plant-based items where bees are used for pollination, travelling around in big trucks which feels far less ethical than bees happily staying in one place and making honey. 

I was initially concerned about how practical becoming vegetarian would be. I'm a fussy eater and find it difficult to eat most vegetables. I've reached a point where I know I ought to eat them and will occasionally have lettuce or other vegetables when offered but they are not something I actively enjoy. There are some vegetables that I really cannot eat because I find them so disgusting, such as cucumber and tomatoes. How then would I cope with eating a plant-based diet when I don't eat many plants?

It turns out, it's fine. These days there are perfectly good meat substitutes everywhere. It's early days but most of the fake meat I've eaten tastes much the same. Even on the few occasions I've had food out recently there's been a perfectly acceptable non-meat alternative to what I'd normally choose. The other bonus is that these meat substitutes always seem to be far healthier than the real thing too, which is good (a diet is heading my way once the summer holidays come to an end). 

The scientist in me is fascinated to see what life as a vegetarian will be like. Am I suddenly going to be the awkward one during meals out? Or is a plant-based culture sinking in enough that things will be easy? Will not eating meat affect my health, both physically and mentally? I guess only time will tell...