Sunday, November 18, 2012

My way of eating less meat

Lots of people talk about eating less meat, be it for a healthier life, religious reasons, or simply trying to reduce animal cruelty. But it's very hard to actually do it for someone who lives in a metropolitan, especially Hong Kong. (Hey did you know that HK ranks *drumroll* FIRST in the world in per capita meat consumption, and is 33% higher than the great US of A?) There's this whole Green Monday movement which is obviously great in trying to reduce total meat consumption by 1/7. But the problem for me is, being a guy with a family, it's very hard to go home and expect everyone else to eat veggie with me. So here's what I think is an alternative, except it's an alternative that's even better:

No meat until sunset.

My rationale is this: it's normally not very hard for a person to go meatless during breakfast. Cereals, yogurts, or just a plain coffee is a great morning starter. For someone like me, who also does intermittent fasting (no food for 16 hours intervals), this is a non issue (since I don't eat anything with calories for breakfast anyways). For lunch, a working person would either eat alone or with friends. The hard part is to find the food, and ample online resources can cater for that. If that's sorted out, eating vegetarian for lunch is pretty easy. At most cuisines there're vegetarian dishes and unless it's Chinese, most have very little sharing going on so there's no issue with causing disturbance for others. I've never had anyone question my food of choice because a four-cheese pizza or a mushroom risotto are perfectly normal food in a meat-eater's eyes.

And for dinner, meat is allowed. That'll dodge a lot of inevitable debates during family dinners. It'll also make dining out easier.

So to wrap it up, this method is clearly not as good as going 100% vegetarian but it's a good middle point, and I see it an improvement versus Green Monday since mathematically I'm getting 3.5 days meat-free (or 2.5 days even if I only do Mondays to Fridays)!

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