As I write this a lot of hot air is being expelled at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) taking place in Glasgow, Scotland. This is where world leaders, and I use that term loosely, get together to try and agree a plan to reduce the temperature the world is warming by and save humanity. Predictably, it is not going well.
Rather than wait for them to get their act together we at home have decided to take matters into our own hands and do our bit. As you can see from the image below (lovingly stolen from the BBC) meat and in particular beef, has a very high impact and so cutting it out would make a difference. I do appreciate that this is a little bit like the butterfly effect but you’ve got to start somewhere.
Of course going completely vegitarian is not going to happen as I subscribe to the Homer Simpson school of thought on meat in that “I have never met an animal I wouldn’t want to eat”. Therefore the key is to cut down rather than eliminate entirely and that’s what we have done.
We started by having two weeks completely vegetarian and when that was done we decided we hadn’t really missed meat that much so we continued the experiment further. We have gone from having maybe one vegetarian meal a week to one meat meal a week.
The key to this change and making it stick has been finding meals that we enjoy, are satisfying and quick to make. This has been particularly straightforward as these days there are so many recipes online to choose from. Our go to for this sort of thing is BBC Good Food and we particularly enjoyed their Crispy Greek Style Pie.
As I said previously just Helen and I going down this road isn’t going to solve the climate crisis on it’s own (wouldn’t that be awesome?!) but if more people do the same, and evidence suggests that we are all eating less meat, then it will start to have an impact.
If you want climate change in music then here’s the fantastic Robert Fripp and Peter Gabriel to spell it out.