[infectoid]

I'm trying to cut meats out of my diet slowly. All seafood was easy as I was never that into it. Pig meat on the other hand... Bacon, Ham, Pork, etc. I knew that it had to go. So I started with that.

Currently I'm an opportunitarian. Chicken is the meat of choice if I can't handle the vegetarian option, otherwise beef. But pig and all seafood is gone from my diet. My hope is that plant-based or cultured meat improves to the point where I don't have these ethical dilemmas anymore. Until then I'll do my best.

I know it's not perfect but it's something. I think more people need to understand that eating and culture are hard to seperate and we need to accomodate that. Making meat a sometimes food is the first step.

[adriand]

Good for you. Keep at it! I became a vegetarian a year ago, at the age of 42, when my eating habits were firmly established. I loved meat and seafood of all kinds, and was the sort of carnivore who was proud of eating the weirdest and bloodiest animal parts available. But at some point I started actually thinking about the animals and the ethics of killing for food, and I couldn’t conscience it any more. Now that you are thinking about it too, I expect your journey will end with you also ceasing to eat meat. Your other option is to tamp down those feelings and ignore what you are feeling is wrong. For good people, that is not easy.

I know you didn’t ask for advice, so apologies in advance, but a really helpful thing is to simply ensure you have plentiful vegetarian food available, so you don’t get too hungry. Eg nuts, seeds, fruit (including dried), plus stuff you can easily use to whip up tasty dishes, like rice you’ve already cooked and can fry with mushrooms or something. At this point the only things I miss are cured meats like ham and salami. But I eat very well every day and in general feel very happy with my choice.

Much respect to you and good luck!

[Accacin]

I at least appreciate your attempts! I'm completely plant-based, but I'm firmly with you that making meat a "sometimes" food is a great idea.

I think a lot of people nowadays seem to be completely one side or the other on a range of topics and it doesn't need to be so clear cut.

[spockz]

In our case we have to avoid gluten, which means avoiding wheats. Most vegetarian dishes contain wheat in some form. So far I haven’t been able to create a week menu with sufficient nutrients without meat or gluten.

It would mean taking supplements. Not sure whether I can stomach the hit to enjoying food it would entail.

[adrian_b]

Maize, rice, potatoes, sweat potatoes, bananas are among the alternative sources that can provide as much starch as wheat, but without any gluten.

I do not have gluten intolerance, but I like better the sources of starch mentioned above, so there are decades since I have last eaten wheat or any of its relatives that contain gluten.

However, I eat only food that I prepare myself from raw ingredients, so I can control precisely its composition. Therefore I can easily avoid what I do not want, e.g. wheat, sugar or undesirable fat sources.

While avoiding gluten is easy, completely avoiding meat is much more difficult, because unlike some kinds of meat, e.g. turkey meat, which are almost pure protein, so you can easily make a menu with a small quantity of meat that is enough to cover your daily needs, covering the same needs with vegetable protein is difficult.

The same small quantity of protein requires either a much larger quantity of vegetables with high protein content and mixed from at least 2 different kinds with complementary amino-acid profile, which will provide much more calories than meat, so to compensate you will have to eat less of other vegetables that you might like more, or you might want to replace meat with vegetable protein extracts, but those are much more expensive than meat and I would not trust their producers to use the best extraction procedures instead of using the cheapest extraction methods.

For now, I do not have enough time and money to eat completely vegan food, so I make 2 exceptions.

My daily menus include 160 g of turkey meat and a spoon of fish oil.

Because these 2 items cover the required daily intake for everything that is hard to get from completely vegan food, I am free to choose the rest of the food from a large variety of strictly non-animal sources.

[me_me_me]

Tried to reduce the meat in my diet, to be honest even beforehand I was probably under the average. But I had hard time staying in pure veg diet. But I never managed to stay on only vegetarian diet. I am not monitoring myself but have few days of no meat a week, depending on my mood and whats in fridge.

I also only eat free range meat now, its much more ethical (in my mind at least). You still eat animals, but at least they had a safe environment to live in. I am not feeling guilty and I think its ok to just reduce amounts and experiment with veg dishes.

[danShumway]

I'm vegan, I love it when people to take this approach. I went through the same process: I eliminated red meat first, then chicken, then fish, hung out for a while as vegetarian, then dropped honey/dairy, and then (hardest step) cheese before finally making the jump to full veganism. Currently trying to reduce cocoa, though I haven't completely eliminated it yet.

Part of what I like about people taking the more gradual approach is that I think they're much less likely to hit a wall and then go back to eating everything. Instead, every step of the process starts from a position of security/safety, and it ends up looking more like a person saying, "I'm comfortable not eating X, maybe I could also be comfortable not eating Y." And I think that makes things a lot less intimidating, and I think it makes it easier to build a different palete, and I think it means that each step is something that's small and surmountable rather than forcing you to build a substitute for every single food at once.

One thing I did as even a micro-step for some categories like dairy was to allow myself to order certain food at a restaurant but not buy it at a grocery store. You could also do the opposite -- depending on where you live, going vegetarian/vegan at restaurants is a good way of figuring out what alternative foods exist and what options you have for meat/dairy replacements.

And honestly, I also think this approach lines up somewhat well with veganism's overall philosophy, which is not about being in a position of moral superiority or about being perfect, it's about reducing harm. Going vegan doesn't mean none of your consumption contributes to suffering, it just reduces that number a bit. And the gradual process (on top of being (imo) easier to do and being less likely to result in backsliding to older habits) also kind of forces the person to live for a while in an uncomfortable place where they're trying to do better and aren't necessarily happy with their efforts or where they currently are. Again opinion me, but I think that's a good emotion for people to get used to if they become vegan; it guards against some of the tendency towards self-importance or pride that gets associated with veganism sometimes. I think it's good to be in a mindset of "X causes suffering, and independent of any other factor do I personally need to do X?"

Of course I'm hoping people go further than just reducing meat consumption, and I do hope that people don't take one step and say, "that's good enough, I don't need to ever think about this again." I also encourage taking tangible steps where you completely cut a food out rather than just reduce it, because "reducing" is a really fuzzy word that is easy to backslide on, and eliminating a food from a diet is a lot more tangible. But even if someone doesn't go any further or take those more tangible steps, reducing is still better than nothing. And I just think -- start with reducing, and see what happens. If you find out you can reduce, then maybe you can stretch a bit further and full-on eliminate that specific animal product, and then maybe you can stretch a bit further again and repeat the process with something else.

You get used to just looking around creatively at your life to see if there are small improvements to your consumption habits you can make, and then afterwards looking around again to see if there are new improvements you can make. I make vegan meals and enjoy certain vegetables now that I would not have had either the knowledge to pull off or the palete to enjoy when I started reducing meat. I think back to when I was getting rid of beef/pork, and there are literally foods that I didn't like back then that are now solid meat substitutes for me.