Question for vegetarians and vegans!

[runnyeggontoast]

I’ve been strongly considering going vegan, or at least vegetarian, for a while but my will power just isn’t strong enough.

I don’t eat red meat often (I don’t hate it but I don’t really like it that much anyway) so I only eat chicken but even then I’m not fussed about it. I eat a lot of seafood and fish mainly. I don’t eat much dairy in a pure form so I wouldn’t miss that (cheese, milk, cream etc) but I eat lots of things with dairy in it and I’d struggle to give that up. I eat a lot of eggs too. I’m quite a fussy eater and found I didn’t like a lot of vegetarian or vegan substitutes and it made it even harder for me, never mind the fact my will power is rubbish.

but I love animals. I have dogs, horses and spend a lot of time around cows, sheep and chickens and it breaks my heart to think of what goes on in slaughterhouses and it makes me sick to think of them as food.

I don’t want to eat meat or dairy or eggs but my willpower is rubbish because ultimately I like fish and I like chocolate and I like chicken.

Does anyone have any advice, or does anyone know of any information about it that will convince my brain and upset me enough to stop eating meat and dairy?

TIA 😀

DH was in your position (me and DS are vegetarian), and he just cut back and cut back, until he realised he hadn’t eaten meat in ages. Probably been 2-3 years now. It helps that I do the food shopping, and don’t buy or cook meat. But he made a point of ordering the vegetarian option when we ate out, and gradually stopped missing it.

I agree that not labelling it helped - he wasn’t Never Having Meat Again, he just was picking the vegetable green curry not the prawn one this time. So no willpower really involved, and slip ups were fine.

I'm not vegan but I have been vegetarian for almost 50 years now. I had been thinking about it for a while but one night we had stew for dinner and as I was chewing a lump of meat, I realised exactly what it was (ie a bit of dead animal in my mouth), took it out of my mouth and never wanted to eat meat of any kind again.

Being vegetarian in a small Scottish town 50 years ago was not that easy. My mother made me learn about nutrition so that I could work out balanced meals but for a long time, most of what was available to me was cheese salad, pasta and egg dishes. It is so much easier now, with such a huge range of veggie and vegan food in shops and eating out places.

I have to say that I missed eating chicken and fish as I enjoyed the taste, but once I had made the decision not to eat the flesh of a dead creature, I was never even slightly tempted to go back to meat eating.

If you eat meat, you are part of the demand which sends animals to their deaths in slaughterhouses (not to mention propping up the inherent cruelty of livestock farming). You need to think this through and if you don't want to be responsible for animals being raised and killed for meat, you need to stop eating meat.

We eat vegan quite a bit and if I wasn't cooking for a fussy family who are, unfortunately, not as motivated as me in terms of what they eat, I would probably be 100% vegan. In the meantime, we only eat eggs from our own pet rescue hens, and only buy organic milk and, as much as possible, organic cheese because the welfare standards are better. Buying organic dairy is not perfect, but choosing organic and limiting the amount we use is the best that I can practicably do at the moment. And I think that it is what it boils down to - that you decide to do as much as you can.