A few years ago I started to divide in two the packages of meat I buy, mostly chicken and ground beef, so that one package that used to provide food for one dinner, now yields two dinners. These are the ways I have begun to cut down on my/our meat consumption.
I would be perfectly happy eating much less meat than I do at present. But when one makes meals for a family, one has to consider the wishes of all involved. I have tried meat substitutes--plant-based sausages and the like, but my husband does not like them. I do like them, however. I have tried plant-based cold cuts, and they are pretty good. And I could happily subsist on anything made from chickpeas. I love hummus and falafel and eat them as often as I can. Baked eggplant is a good substitute for a meat dinner; it is delicious served over rice. I do like cheese so that would be hard to give up completely; the same is true for canned tuna fish (I love canned tuna but I know that tuna are overfished. But at least they are not farmed). What I'd like to try is laboratory-produced meat (producing a chicken breast, etc, from a chicken cell--that sounds promising, at least at present).
I think we just need to start somewhere. We need to rethink meal planning and the importance of eating less meat for all the reasons listed in the article, but also to improve our health. We don't need to eat the amount of meat we eat currently to survive. Our parents' generation managed to live on much less meat, and we can too. I am including a link to a short pamphlet that one can download from World Animal Protection; it's called Meating Halfway and it's worth downloading. You have to join the #EatLessMeat this Year movement in order to download it:
