I’ve decided to eat less meat and consume less animal products.
All-at-once changes in habit don’t work for me, and in any case I’m not ready to become a vegetarian. But just “doing it less often” won’t work. I’m an omnivore and lazy. Failure awaits.
Instead, I have committed to one vegetarian day a week. There’s no way I can’t do that, and since it’s formalized it will be harder to screw it up.
I will probably make it a weekday, maybe Wednesday. I’ll decide next week. Today, though, was such a day. I consumed:
Coffee w/milk
A banana.
Ice tea/lemonade drink.
Salad of beets, sweet red peppers, and cucumber in a yogurt-lemon dressing with coarse black pepper
Arabian flatbread
Sweet corn soup w/black pepper
Red wine
Gin
Stoned wheat crackers
Beer
Probably more beer later
Gosh, this is going to be PAINFUL!
Be My Blog 
Ginivore!
Wow, I think I could really subsist on flatbread, Arnold Palmers, and gin. Um, actually maybe I do that right now.
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I’m sort of an accidental, unintentional vegetarian pretty frequently. I like meat, but I don’t cook it that often. I guess I consume it more if I go out to eat. On the other hand… animal PRODUCTS, by which I mean dairy? Dairy I can’t do without. Today, not thinking about it: oatmeal for breakfast, tea with cream. Then black beans and rice, with queso fresco, salsa, and crema, for dinner. And some nuts and dried fruit, at some point. And grapefruit juice. Hmm. There is a conspicuous absence of actual vegetables there.
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Gotta eat protein on those meatless days too!
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Nah
Protein is overrated. It’s usually a cultural shorthand for meat. Anyway I am unlikely to get pellagra this way.
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Re: Nah
Don’t you know plants don’t contain any protein? 😉
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Re: Nah
True, but seitan and tempeh and nuts and beans are tasty and you shouldn’t miss out 🙂
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Re: Nah
I can’t make friends with tempeh. Every time I’ve had it it’s like eating a seat belt.
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Re: Nah
Did you marinate it first?
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This sounds like a good plan! Let me know if you ever want meal suggestions. Oh, since you are a good cook and stuff, I imagine you could make really inspired dishes from 101cookbooks. Stuff I look at and think “If I had less (picky) kids climbing on me I would make this.” Like this:
http://www.101cookbooks.com/archives/kabocha-french-lentil-soup-recipe.html
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just remember to eat more often on your veg days. that’s the trick.
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> I’ve decided to eat less meat and consume less animal products.
Well, why, if I may ask? Because what you’ve said is a very different story from “I would like to eat more vegetables.”
If you keep it at 1 vegetarian day a week, that’s no biggie. But I was a vegan for 18 months and I can tell you that trying to cut down on meat and animal products IS painful and not rewarding–UNLESS you have a compelling reason.
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I want to reduce my footprint because I believe it’s socially responsible. I’m not interested in veganism and at this point it’s unlikely that I’ll become fully vegetarian. It’s a matter of scaling back, and reminding myself that it’s a good idea to scale back further.
It’s not really a big deal. I only wrote about it because I was interested in sharing the idea of doing something one day a week as a particular kind of discipline.
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It makes me angry and genuinely sad that it’s come down to this. For us to be responsible citizens of the world we now have to declare war on our eating habits. I can’t help the feeling that we’re being played.
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are you drinking veg beer?
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It doesn’t have meat in it as far as I know.
I’m not going vegan, even one day a week. 🙂
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I do dairy and eggs, but won’t eat things filtered in bone and made with lard etc.. I guess it really depends on where you draw the line.
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Yeah, it does get fuzzy at a certain point. Right now for me it will be “no actual meat and less animal products” on that day. I’m trying to make it as simple as possible.
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we should go to happy family on one of your veg days!
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