To not understand why some people dont eat meat free meals

[reducingfootprint]

I do not call myself vegetarian but i eat meat rarely for health reasons (bowel cancer is common in the family) but i am happy to prepare it as my dh eats meat but enjoys meat free meals around 4 times a week. DC also eat meat free around 4 times a week. My siblings and their partners are also part time vegetarians and pre covid we all enjoyed getting together for meat free feasts.

When DM comes over, she refuses to eat anything without meat. Butternut squash soup? Needs bacon.
Halloumi fajitas? Needs beef.
Goats cheese and onion omelette? Needs chicken.
Plowmans salad? Needs ham.

AIBU to think ffs one meal without meat wont kill you!

My blood sugar is a lot better controlled if I don’t overeat carbs. It’s hard to get enough protein and fat to give me enough calories without meat or meat substitutes. I prefer meat to meat substitutes. Meat substitutes are highly processed abc often have seed oils. Meat is natural, fresh and unprocessed.

I do like vegetables, but I'm absolutely ravenous within a short time after eating a meal without animal protein, even if the calorie content is fairly high and there are pulses in the meal. A meal with meat in will keep me going for hours longer ( I can't eat much egg or dairy, it makes me queasy).

If I were offered a vegetarian meal at someone else's house I would eat it to be polite and try and get snack from somewhere later.

Also I believe the most environmentally friendly diet isn't vegan, but a diet where we get our protein from insects. The insects are ground into a protein powder to use in meals.

The most I can do with no meat is chips and egg (and even that really needs a sausage).
I’m a meat eater, even a cheese sandwich doesn’t quite cut it.

YANBU. I am not vegetarian but have delicious meat free meals all the time. If your mother in-law is aware of your health concerns she is being very selfish

DH cooks in our house so most meals do have fish or meat to be honest as we both like it.
But neither of us would turn down a meat-free meal, or be averse to it (we’re quite capable of eating vegetable soup) and we especially wouldn’t turn down something someone else had made for us!

Your DM is not being unreasonable to prefer the taste of food with a little meat in it. Like the heart, the mouth wants what it wants. She is being unreasonable to be so precious about it, though. Not going to a birthday dinner because the restaurant is veggie? Not enough information to say what it says about her that she refuses to go with the flow and make the accommodations to other people's wishes that everyone in a family makes all the time. But it definitely says something.

Vegans, and those who make a point of being opposed to them are equally tedious imo.

As this thread has demonstrated.

@SadSisters

I don’t understand people who eat veg for every meal. How boring.

There are 300,000 edible plants, including garlic, lemon, chilli, vanilla, basil, tomatoes, rosemary, potatoes, paprika, leeks, limes, olives, rice, cocoa, coffee, sweet potatoes, asparagus, raspberries, rhubarb, spinach, peanuts, coconuts and mint. If you think that’s boring, it’s just because you’re a bad cook

How true! I mean, we have the internet and can get any recipe you want by typing the ingrediants into the search bar...its just lazy cooking!

Ugh, I'd hate to eat in your house. Just because you can't eat meat, doesn't mean others shouldn't enjoy it. I bet your husband gets well excited when you go out to eat 😂

Who cares what other people eat? You don't need to understand someone else's food preferences ffs. Not everyone wants to eat like you.

YABU for the simple fact that it's her personal preference.

The phrase "meat free FEAST" is an oxymoron..... there's no "feast" in a vegetable only meal, at best it's just a multitude of fancy vegetable side dishes.

I LOVE meat, I don't mind vegetables but they are not a main course as far as I'm concerned, a bit of stir fried chilli bean tofu is as meat free as I get, that and Mac n Cheese.

It's a no from me.

Some people have good reasons for preferring some animal protein - it can be difficult when working very hard under cold conditions, for example, to get enough calories without.

But in my experience people who can't stand the idea of a meal without meat tend to be people who don't like change generally.

If I lived on my own I would probably eat 80% vegetarian meals.

We will eat more as the dc grow older and less fussy. One is vege already, but the others are meat and two veg type people.

@Jadee753

Ugh, I'd hate to eat in your house. Just because you can't eat meat, doesn't mean others shouldn't enjoy it. I bet your husband gets well excited when you go out to eat 😂

But would it hurt you to forgo meat for just one meal? Really? Are you at primary school?

The phrase "meat free FEAST" is an oxymoron..... there's no "feast" in a vegetable only meal, at best it's just a multitude of fancy vegetable side dishes.

Wow! You must be exceptionally hard of thinking
And I say that as a meat eater.

Sausages don't give that many people explosive diarrhea like quorn does, unless they are off.

Burger patty should simply consist of meat and herbs and spices (including onion and likes). Added egg at best.

Usually people who say they don't like the highly processed vegan food, don't like the highly processed meat food too.

If people were so passionate about and demanded companies moving away from coal like they are about explaining people who eat meat how unenvironmental they are, we would have half the emissions in the air

Am so with you OP - not vego but genuinely adore eating veggies & have many meat free meals.

I would rather eat vego for a month & then have one juicy, succulent A grade grass fed wagyu - than be bogged down eating cheap shitty grade mince etc

Quality not quantity when it comes to meat consumption for me

I love meat and fish, but for environmental reasons we have cut down the amount we eat. I only buy free range, high welfare meat (and we live near farms so as much as possible it's from those farms) so it's not cheap to buy lots either.

We eat extremely well, meat or no meat. We try to eat seasonally and locally when we can for fresh produce, which means we're just seeing the end of the asparagus for example. It makes eating more interesting when we can only eat things for some of the year. I don't think I particularly notice if it's a meat meal or not, unless it's a roast or shellfish platter, or something else based around the meat content.

We use loads of herbs and spices, and enjoy experimenting and reading cook books. Some of my favourite meals are veggie, and as someone who grew up with a father who needed red meat a certain number of times a week, really not eating vegetables till my late teens, I'm not sure my younger self would recognise me.

Food is a joy, and a pastime. We have some picky child eaters in the household but try to sneak new things in all the time and occasionally it works!

I don't know why some people make an absolute scene about having meat with everything. I say that particularly in reference to my obnoxious ex FIL who'd make very rude remarks if presented with anything meat free. (This is the man who said "you must be a puff" to my exH because he'd mentioned eating hummus - ffs)
I like meat and I would say around 75% of the dinners I make for myself are meat based but I enjoy a lot of vegetarian dishes and will often order them in restaurants

It's old school mentality that meat belongs in every meal and it's a weird sort of snobbery that a vegetarian meal is 'missing' something without meat and is substandard or of less value. I find a lot of people in my parent's generation (70+) believe this, just because it was a common idea when they grew up.

It's important to question to ask - as mass meat production has a pretty negative effect on the environment and significant consumption, especially fattier meats like sausage, have a poor effect on health.

Still there will always be people on Mumsnet who just retort 'It's none of your business' as if nothing should be questioned or challenged, even if it's for the benefit of the planet.

My FiL did eat a vegetarian meal a few months ago. Veggie pasta at a restaurant. We got a text to tell us.

I'm not a veggie but it seems odd to put meat with every meal. If I had scrambled egg on toast for breakfast I wouldn't think I had to add bacon or it's not a complete meal. Never met anyone who thinks like that!

@SadSisters

that's a very common argument for veganism... sad reality is that, in the UK for example, there is not enough futile land to produce the amount of crops needed to feed a vegan population. Many crpos with a high nutritional value don't grow in our climate without help... Meat on the other hand can be produced much more easily... think Welsh hill farm lamb, Scottish highland beef... Rice for example is a stable food, yet very damaging to the environment as well as of a poor nutritional value. Many vegan products that are available do have a high carbon footprint they are sourced in 3rd world countries. This does not sound very environment frendly or ethical to me. I am for sustainability rather than a forced ethical reasoning. I like to buy local produce, where I can - it's better all round.

Sorry @Ylvamoon, but this categorically isn’t true. It is far better for the environment to eat a vegan diet, even if it is completely comprised of imported foods, than it is to eat an omnivorous diet, even if all of your meat is locally produced.

This is clear from the mathematics of carbon emissions. 1kg of lamb consumed leads to about 40kg of carbon emissions. 1kg of avocados (one of the least environmentally friendly vegan foods, because they are all grown abroad and they have to be flown to their destination rather than shipped, like most foods) leads to about 0.86kg of carbon emissions. Therefore, meat eaters would have to be eating 46 times as many kilos of avocados as they were eating kilos of beef for the environmental impact to be comparable. So even if meat-eaters switched to exclusively consume even the most environmentally unfriendly of vegan foods, their impact on the environment would still be significantly less than it is while they eat locally produced meat.

This site shows just how little it matters that your meat is locally produced: ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local

So, it doesn’t matter that grazing land in the U.K. isn’t always suitable for arable agriculture. We could re-wild areas where crops can’t be grown, creating new habitats for our native species and carbon capture (www.forestcarbon.co.uk/), and import food from abroad and it would represent a massive reduction in the food-generated carbon footprint of this country.

Carbon emissions of that kind aren't all that important - they are just part of the carbon cycle. It's the same thing that gets trotted out with water - cows drinking water is not a problem in itself, if it is in a place with enough water and it isn't being polluted. It's a problem when you are sucking aquifers dry or filling rivers with pig shit.

Monocultures, be they plant or animal based, are not sustainable. They destro the land, even if you use them to make tofu. Animals have an important place in mixed agriculture because they create all kinds of efficiencies and synergies. They make use of agricultural waste, they provide energy that can be stored, they provide labour, they provide soil amendments, they are part of a proper agricultural rotation. They are well suited to good land care practices like small fields, hedgerows, meadows. Monocropping and industrial farming can never accomplish that.

The issue is scale - it can never scale up to the way we eat meat now. But to a large degree industrial animal ag is driven by industrial crops. So even there, it's a system problem.

As for importing food - that is a serious food security issue, it tends to lead to exploitation of land in far off places just like outsourcing industry does, and can easily mean the wealthy westerners bellies are filled rather than those of local people. The fact that it's possible depends on cheap fuel and international travel.

@Waferbiscuit

It's old school mentality that meat belongs in every meal and it's a weird sort of snobbery that a vegetarian meal is 'missing' something without meat and is substandard or of less value. I find a lot of people in my parent's generation (70+) believe this, just because it was a common idea when they grew up.

It's important to question to ask - as mass meat production has a pretty negative effect on the environment and significant consumption, especially fattier meats like sausage, have a poor effect on health.

Still there will always be people on Mumsnet who just retort 'It's none of your business' as if nothing should be questioned or challenged, even if it's for the benefit of the planet.

I'm not sure if that is true - my mother is in her late 60s and when she was growing up, it was still normal to have a big roast on Sunday, and then use the leftovers through the week. Some meals had no meat as it didn't stretch to every supper and most that did had small amounts.

That may be though why some older people are so attached to the idea - it signifies a certain degree of financial stability to them.

That may be though why some older people are so attached to the idea - it signifies a certain degree of financial stability to them.

@Goosefoot - agree, that's it. Here and in many countries meat is associated with wealth and so an important 'signifier'.