I still remember the last time I ever ate meat. I was on my lunch break at work and decided that today was a good day for a Greggs Pepperoni Pizza. I bought my pizza and sat in the staff room, happily munching away without thinking more of what I was eating, and I was fine.
Until later that night.
You see, the pizza had given me food poisoning and I promise you, I'm not lying when I tell you that I was dreaming about that pizza moments before I woke up to be violently sick. I remember being sat on my bathroom floor, my head in the toilet thinking: "Was it really worth it?"
The answer is that for me, it was not.
You see until this incident, I was on my way to becoming Vegetarian but hadn't quite made the transition. I was (and still very much am) a picky eater, and so cutting food options out of my diet seemed like a bad idea. God knows my parents were stressed about it. But increasingly as time went on I could no longer separate my food from the reality of where it came from. Whenever I ate meat a guilty voice would be there, lurking in the back of my mind, telling me that a creature had died for my food choices.
Whilst some of you may be okay with that choice, I was not. I hated the thought that there were beings suffering because of me and I had the power to make a change. It didn't seem right that a creature should die for my meal when there were so many alternatives, so I decided then and there. No more.
My choice stemmed from ethical reasons and I still stick by them, but later I realised how much of a difference not eating meat would make to my environmental impact.
Eating meat does not only use up way more water than alternatives but it is also partially to blame for deforestation, extinction of species, destruction of coral reefs, the deaths of marine creatures who are "bycatch" as well as the deaths of millions of farm animals.
Even by just reducing your intake of meat makes a huge difference! The little things you do count so don't think they don't. Buying Quorn instead of real meat, having meat free days in your week, buying Olive spread instead of butter, there are so many things you can do to help if you really can't give it up.
But for me, I decided that eating some of my favourite foods was not worth the amount of damage caused to our planet, and the violence caused to its inhabitants.
I decided that I could do better to help this planet we call home.
(There's an awesome resource that works out how many animals you haven't eaten, as well as how much CO2 you have saved, depending on how long you have been Vegetarian/Vegan! Click here to give it a go.)
Cover Photo by William Pilgrim (https://www.instagram.com/wgbp_/)
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