Here are a few things that shouldn't be a huge surprise to most Daily Kos readers. Eating meat is terrible for the environment:
According to a 2006 United Nations report, livestock accounts for 18 percent of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. Some of meat's contribution to climate change is intuitive. It's more energy efficient to grow grain and feed it to people than it is to grow grain and turn it into feed that we give to calves until they become adults that we then slaughter to feed to people. Some of the contribution is gross. "Manure lagoons," for instance, is the oddly evocative name for the acres of animal excrement that sit in the sun steaming nitrous oxide into the atmosphere. And some of it would make Bart Simpson chuckle. Cow gas -- interestingly, it's mainly burps, not farts -- is a real player.
But the result isn't funny at all: Two researchers at the University of Chicago estimated that switching to a vegan diet would have a bigger impact than trading in your gas guzzler for a Prius (PDF). A study out of Carnegie Mellon University found that the average American would do less for the planet by switching to a totally local diet than by going vegetarian one day a week.
Eating meat -- or at least a lot of it -- is also not that good for you:
Very good reasons for cutting meat out of your diet. Yet only around 3% of the US population follows a vegetarian diet. And I'm hardly here to blame the other 97%, since I'm among them.
So yes, I eat meat, and I have no immediate intention of going entirely vegetarian, even in the face of some seriously compelling reasons to do so. But neither do I just want to recklessly say "hell with the environment; hell with poor people around the world." Hence the appeal of things like Meatless Monday or the PB&J Campaign. The idea is reducing the meat in your diet, mitigating climate change and for that matter the health impacts of a meat-filled diet.
Basically the idea is that you don't have to go entirely vegetarian to make a difference. Every meal in which you might otherwise have eaten meat and choose not to, you're doing a damn good thing:
Greenhouse Gas Emissions: 2.5 Pounds
Each time you have a plant-based lunch like a PB&J you'll reduce your carbon footprint by the equivalent of 2.5 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions over an average animal-based lunch like a hamburger, a tuna sandwich, grilled cheese, or chicken nuggets. For dinner you save 2.8 pounds and for breakfast 2.0 pounds of emissions.
Those 2.5 pounds of emissions at lunch are about forty percent of the greenhouse gas emissions you'd save driving around for the day in a hybrid instead of a standard sedan.
If you have a PB&J instead of a red-meat lunch like a ham sandwich or a hamburger, you shrink your carbon footprint by almost 3.5 pounds of greenhouse gas emissions.
Conserve Water: 133 Gallons
You'll conserve water at lunch too! How about 133 gallons of water conserved at lunch versus the average American lunch? To put this in perspective, five PB&Js or other plant-based lunches per month would save more water than switching to a low-flow showerhead. If you're replacing hamburgers, it should take you just three lunches to conserve more water than the low-flow showerhead.
Save Land: 24 Square Feet
Don't forget the land you save from deforestation, over-grazing, and pesticide and fertilizer pollution: about 24 square feet at lunch.
So this is what I've been working on -- as have many other members of the Daily Kos community -- just cutting back. (My own relationship with meat is somewhat complicated by the fact that I have to follow a gluten-free diet. In fact, through my late teens and early 20s I basically didn't eat red meat; I resumed eating it because I thought "if I have to give up pasta and pizza and bread, I have to give myself something back." But now that I've become comfortable with eating gluten free, and there are more pastas and pizzas and breads available that I can eat, I figure it would be irresponsible not to cut back on my meats.)
There's no one right way to do this. Everyone faces different challenges and different temptations. The person who eats meat at every meal will probably see it as a huge challenge to go through an entire day without meat. But maybe for that person the answer, at least for starters, is not meatless Monday but meatless breakfasts -- so you ask yourself "can I take the meat out of my breakfast three or four days a week?" Then once you've mastered breakfast, you move to lunch. Actual PB&J once in a while. Maybe egg salad. (Veganism is a worthy but advanced move I will not be tackling here or in my life.) By contrast the person who already eats a low-meat diet will have fewer meals to cut meat out of -- but the value of doing so remains the same per meal.
For some people, one of the challenges of planning meatless meals may be the association of vegetarianism with...earnest, healthy food. Bean sprouts. Tofu. Under-seasoning. But it in no way has to be that way. Shoot, a lot of classic Asian tofu dishes contain meat; more to the point, though, tofu can be amazing if you don't try to make it something it's not by pressing it into a hot dog. On the other hand, many classic comfort foods are or can easily be meatless. Grilled cheese (with or without tomato soup). Spaghetti. Pizza. In other words, vegetarian does not have to be healthy or boring. It requires a little more planning if you're accustomed to slapping a piece of meat in a pan and figuring out side dishes while that cooks. But just as when you first became an adult and started cooking for yourself, you'll figure out a few reliable, easy meals and then a few more, and after a little time has passed your meatless meals will be second nature and you'll be escalating from meatless breakfasts to meatless days and then from one day to two or three.
I've included a few favorite recipes after the jump, and knowing this community, I'm betting there'll be many more offered in comments. Also check out beach babe in fl's Macca's Meatless Monday series, which offers weekly facts, recipes, and Paul McCartney/Beatles clips.
Lately my favorite source of recipes has been the New York Times. A few particularly beloved finds there:
Ginger fried rice -- Not the simplest fried rice recipe of all time, but unbelievably elegant and delicious. My boyfriend says it's one of his two or three favorite things I cook, with or without meat.
Baked quinoa with spinach and cheese -- I double the spinach in the recipe. I served it at a brunch last year, and when I was planning another brunch recently I had requests to serve it again.
Pumpkin dumplings -- You could really think of these as pumpkin gnocchi, but a simpler and healthier gnocchi than potato. The dumplings themselves are incredibly easy: mix a can of pumpkin, a cup of flour, two eggs, and a teaspoon of salt, then drop by teaspoons into boiling salted water and fishing them out a couple minutes after they float to the surface. Really, it's that easy.
The recipe includes a radicchio sauce which may well be delicious, but the first time I made the dumplings, I had no radicchio, and it was so delicious with the sauce I made that I haven't bothered to do it differently. That sauce is a simple tomato vodka cream sauce:
2-3 cloves garlic, minced
28 oz can crushed or ground tomatoes
red pepper flakes
2-3 tablespoons vodka
1/3-1/2 cup cream
salt and pepper
Saute the garlic for a minute in olive oil, until it's fragrant and a little soft. Add the tomatoes and some red pepper flakes (according to how spicy you like your food) and simmer for 20 minutes or longer. At the end, add the vodka, cream, and salt and pepper to taste.
As the pumpkin dumplings are cooked, transfer them into the still-simmering sauce with a slotted spoon. Excellent with parmesan cheese, and does well left over.
Vegetarian chili is probably my longest-standing, most reliable vegetarian meal. I got this recipe from a college housemate, and have tweaked it a bit myself. I've been known to combine it with oven fries and a slice of cheese to have chili cheese fries for my Meatless Monday.
3-4 tablespoons olive oil
2-6 cloves garlic, minced (obviously dependent on how much you like garlic; I use the high end)
1 large onion, chopped
1 large green bell pepper, diced
3 15 oz cans red beans or dark red kidney beans, drained and rinsed
28 oz can ground or crushed tomatoes
1/2 can tomato paste
1-2 bay leaves
4 tablespoons chili powder
1-2 teaspoons ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon salt, more if your canned beans are low in sodium
1/4 teaspoon pepper
Saute the vegetables over low heat until they're soft and the onion is translucent. Dump in the other ingredients and simmer, covered, over very low heat for at least 3 hours, stirring occasionally. (I use a slow cooker and leave it cooking for up to 8 hours.) As it cooks, I check the seasonings and often add more tomato paste and salt.
Edited to add: This recipe is obviously pretty aggressively spiced, but it doesn't have much heat. If you want to add heat, pretty much pick your method -- add some finely chopped hot pepper when you saute the onion and garlic, add some cayenne with the chili powder, pretty much whatever. Also, argh! This is what happens when you make a recipe less from a recipe than from habit: you'll want to add some water along with the tomatoes etc.
So please, share your recipes and your stories of reducing meat in your own diet.