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It took me a long time to stop eating meat, longer than I would have liked, but I managed to stop when it finally felt like I wasn't going without - and that's a lot of work for someone raised in meat and taters.
But one thing I do know is that shaming people or making people feel bad for eating meat isn't the best way to go about converting people to vegetarians... It just makes you look like a jerk.
If you want to help people eat less meat, provide easy recipes for full meals that have a meat like substitute that doesn't suck. What worked for me was beans - specifically black bean burgers because I love burgers - so it took a long time to find the right black bean burger for me.
It just takes starting with one thing - and if it ends with one thing, that's okay too because that person will consume less meat because of the change.
Sorry. End rant.
People also need to be eased Into it. The stop eating meat approach doesn't work but if you give me a good ass recipe to try and it just happens to not have meat Its not that big of a deal and nobody feels like they're being converted.
I eat meat but being Mexican I also have plenty of recipes and meals that are vegetarian in nature. Enchiladas de queso fresco, tostadas de frijoles, sopes vegetarianos, caldo de garbanzo, esquites, calabasa y elote a la crema, quesadillas. Just to name a few off of the top of my head. That's not even counting stuff like cereal, pancakes, etc. All of them are vegetarian and delicious and non were pushed on me for vegetarian reasons, they're just a part of my culture. I have tried to make a small effort to eat a bit less meat for health reasons but I don't think I'll stop. If we approached the issue in another way we might get more people to just eat less meat and it's a step in the right direction.
My fiancee is half salvadoreña and half Lebanese and when I told her she already eats a significant percentage of vegetarian meals she didn't believe me until I went through her last weeks meals. Baby steps people, small baby hamster steps.
There is also the problem that a lot of times the argument for why it's better is not framed properly. Plenty Of Studies have shown that if literally everyone were to suddenly go vegetarian we would have the exact same problem just now with vegetables instead of meat. The supply wouldn't be there things would get ramped up emissions and resource use especially water would increase drastically to try and keep up with the demand.
If you're going vegetarian just because you don't like the idea of eating animals then that's fine, but if you're at all coming at it from the sustainability perspective then the true solution is a dietary mix that is more heavy towards the vegetarian side of things but still with some meat mixed in just not a dietary staple eating constantly.
Can you share these studies?
Because it sounds a bit ridiculous.
https://phys.org/news/2023-02-veganism-planet-limited-meat-consumption.html
Sure this is a fairly recent one. It makes intuitive Sense on the surface that going pure vegetarian would be beneficial and reduce emissions. But that's because we are comparing it to a system of meat that is based off the current demand where a majority of people are large consumers of it regularly.
Animals can be beneficial environmentally speaking even when raised for food, and the resource cost for growing vegetarian food can end up becoming quite large when you scale it to that same level.
Extremes are rarely the true solution there is usually a middle ground this is no exception
That just says soybeans and palm oil are imported in and that’s bad.
Kinda unrelated, yeah?
Most of the soybean products (like tofu and tempeh) in the U.S. aren't grown here, the study found. Up until recently, they were largely imported from India, where soybean production contributes to widespread deforestation and habitat loss. Soybean plantations also take up valuable land space that could be used to ease food insecurity in the country instead.
And the pollution and environmental impact from transporting soybeans hundreds of thousands of miles to the U.S. is its own environmental catastrophe.
Similarly, palm oil, which is often used as a vegan substitute for butter or lard, is mostly imported from Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Nigeria. Local ecosystems there have been devastated by deforestation and loss of biodiversity as millions of hectares of forests are razed for palm oil production.
On top of its environmental impact, the palm oil industry has been the subject of numerous allegations of human rights violations. Child labor, rampant sexual abuse and rape, and exposure to hazardous pesticides without proper protective equipment aren't uncommon.
"People prioritize the lives of livestock and domesticated farm animals over the lives of the people who grow palm oil or soybeans," Trauger said. "Corporations love to market to people that eating this way will make a difference in the world, but it won't."
Soybeans are a fairly large part of most purely vegetarian diets, as they provide a metric ton of the various nutrients one needs, you can get around that with enough other types of vegetables but SB is the quickest and easiest which means it would likely become one of the most heavily consumed parts of an all vegetarian economy if everyone were to suddenly switch.
Soybeans, kale, and winter squashes are generally the most popular because they are very heavily nutrient and vitamin dense. But they don't exactly scale to extreme levels cleanly.
Again, to be clear, I am advocating for a switch to primarily vegetarian diets. I'm just saying going exclusively vegetarian isn't necessarily going to be great and will come with its own set of challenges and problems. A middle ground of primarily vegetarian but still some light meat usage is going to be the healthier Middle Ground both for your diet and the environment