Manifesto

In the interests of transparency, I would like to set out what I will and won't eat during the month of February.

I'm not going to eat any animal flesh.  So no meat or fish.  I will eat dairy and animal products that don't involve the death of the animal, such as eggs and honey.

I'm not going to bother with things like rennet and gelatine, even though these are actually animal derivatives.  The reason for this is mostly practical, I feel as though the restrictions I have already made make this a big enough challenge for me and to exclude something like animal rennet would make eating out quite difficult for me.

The real aim of this month is to significantly reduce my meat intake, which, by cutting out meat altogether I should be able to manage. 

Background

I love meat. So does my family. I grew up in a tiny town in the central North Island of New Zealand. When I mention rural New Zealand, what immediately springs to mind? SHEEP.

Yes, sheep. One of my most annoying memories of childhood is of this woman at a Palmerston North inter-school debating tournaments asking my team-mates and me if we had had to get up really early in order to milk the cows before coming to the competition. As if you could farm cows up there. Cows need flat land, not hill country. This is why most of the farmers in the district run sheep on their land.

Although I grew up on a section in the township, my childhood was still pretty rural. My father killed virtually all the meat that we ate. He is the only person I know who takes annual leave from his real job in order to go and spend a few weeks doing hard physical labour at his friends' farms. As a result of this, we had a never-ending supply of mutton and hogget.

It was only when I left home to go to university that I started to realise that it's not typical to come home from school to see several sheep carcases strung up in the garage dripping blood all over the concrete. Or to walk into the kitchen and find my dad butchering half a mutton into chops and roasts with a saw. Meals were roast mutton on a Monday, stewed mutton in the crockpot on Tuesday, homemade mutton sausages with sage and garlic from Dad's garden on Wednesdays. Fish and chips on Sundays when it was Dad's turn to cook. I can't remember what we had on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, but you can be sure that it wasn't meat free.

So, meat played a certain role in my childhood and will probably always be quite nostalgic for me. I don't want to exaggerate, but it's hard to imagine a life without it. I'm not even sure if I will tell my parents about my experiment. I don't fancy their reaction if I ever became a proper vegetarian. That would be even more awkward than the Christmas they announced they were going to the cemetery to pick out a burial plot. At least I won't be offended if the rest of my family doesn't want to join in.

Throwing down the gauntlet

Today in the kitchen at work I had a chat to a colleague, Alex, who I am hoping will let me interview him for this blog. He was at one point a vegetarian because his girlfriend was one too. I think it was a somewhat reluctant choice because every so often he would sneak off for a steak or something. Bad vege.

Anyway, when I told him about my plan to go vego for a month, he told me that if I make it without cheating, it would be very unlikely for me to go back, and that from hence-forth I would find meat 'yuck'.

Even though it's pretty hard for me to imagine myself really repulsed by meat, it has made me a bit scared. How would I manage eating out? Would my parents still talk to me? The latter might seem like a bit of an exaggeration, but wait until you hear a bit about my background.

Introduction

My name is Evealyn O'Connor and one of my new year's resolutions is to abstain from eating meat for one month. I am going to do this during February 2010.

Like many over-educated soft urban dwellers, my personal health and the environment are two things that I think about quite a lot. I grant you it does seem like a strange combination, but certain things about my lifestyle make it not so unlikely. My job at a certain large government department involves sitting in front of a computer for approximately eight hours a day, five days a week. Hardly a natural state. Every day when I go to find lunch, or sort something out for my dinner, I have to think seriously about things like fat and cholesterol. How disappointing to have to prioritise these over exciting things like blue cheese or bacon.

At the same time, I have found myself considering the impact of my consumption on the environment. Originally this was mostly because, well, what university student doesn't feel compelled to save the world at some point? It's as much a rite of passage as lining up for dodgy bars and drinking flaming shots of liquor. Take my sister, a second year student at Victoria, who, when we buy a juice while out shopping, will take our empty glasses home with her to ensure that they are put out for recycling. God forbid they should end up in an ordinary rubbish bin! However, as I get older and hopefully wiser, I find it hard to deny the call to reduce and conserve. On a recent trip to China, I was shocked at the general dirtiness and rubbish that seemed to be everywhere. One hostel we stayed at in Shanghai shared an alleyway with a restaurant, whose bin (if you could call it that) would be literally overflowing with festering, rotting food scraps. I began to really miss trees and green spaces, which were very few and far between.

So, it seems that meat might be something of a culprit in terms of both of these evils. Meat is a convenient source of protein, but it often has a lot of fat, and in particular saturated fat. It's suggested that there is a link between red meat consumption and illnesses such as heart disease and cancer, although this probably hasn't been proved conclusively. The environmental impact is very serious. The production of meat accounts for 18% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, even more so than transport. I find that really shocking, given the amount of people in the world driving cars and boarding aeroplanes every day. Even the UN has suggested reducing meat consumption as a realistic way of combating global warming.

I have flirted with the idea of going vege on and off for some time. Every so often I will announce that I am definitely going to reduce my meat intake and get into beans in a big way. The problem is though, that I bloody love meat. I can't deny that it is delicious. Lots of other people like it too.

But even I'm not silly enough to pretend that my one month sabbatical is anything special. In fact, it is pretty ridiculous. And insignificant. But you know what? Its something that I can realistically do, and so I'm going to do it.

Over the next wee while I am going to post a variety of things. I have plans to put up recipes, interviews with actual (not pretend like me) meat abstainers, and essays on meat and environmental related issues. At the very least, it will reduce my own meat intake, and perhaps even distract me from watching documentaries about David Hasselhoff on Sunday afternoons.