Resolution #2: Becoming Vegetarian

My second new years resolution has been to ditch all meat products and go vegetarian. 

I won’t pretend that its because I love animals – was it Homer Simpson who said “If God didn’t want us to eat animals, he wouldn’t have made them out of meat”?   Don’t get me wrong – I would never actually wish harm on an animal myself – what I mean is that I have never let the thought of a poor piggy put me off a bacon sarnie.

No, the real reasons that I have decided to go vegetarian are firstly, I honestly believe it is healthier.  Plant foods are packed with all of the vitamins and minerals that you need to maintain a healthy lifestyle, whereas meat, aside from the b-vits are vitamin free.   Ok, ok…you get a lot of protein from meat, but you can also get it from pulses and legumes and eggs.

The other main reason for me is quite frankly…I don’t trust much of the meat for sale here in the UK.  Take a look at this article about the DEFRA guidelines for free range and organic.  Not comfortable reading!  Not to mention all the hormones and anti-biotics in meat products.

And then of course there is the ecological effect of farming animals for food.  There is a whole host of information available about how animal farming is not as energy efficient as vegetable farming on the web.  I’m too lazy to trawl through and list them here, but google it and you will see what I mean.

So how am I doing?  Really well actually!  I actually started this ‘new’ way of living just after Christmas (the last bit of meat was a bit of beef on boxing day lovingly cooked for me by V), and I haven’t missed not having meat at all.

In fact, I’ve started getting a bit “Master Chef” about the whole thing…knocking up soup from scratch.  However, I haven’t progressed further than soup recipes so far…and a girl can’t live by soup alone – if only for social reasons!  (Poor V…an innocent bystander in my experiment!)

So inbetween writing this blog post, eating oranges and listening to The Smiths ‘Meat is Murder’ on a loop, I am reading through various vegetarian recipe sites.  Wish me luck!