How do I make the transition from meat eater to vegetarian?

[Alondra]

I want to do it. I've struggled for a long time with my feelings about eating animals and the industry behind it, and my love (pleasure really) with the dishes I love.

I rarely eat steaks but looking into my dietary habits, meat (including chicken) is still 40% of what I eat, 30% is fish and only 30% will be vegetable only meals.

I love legumes in winter but I add chorizo to my lentils or make a chickpea cocido with chicken stock.

I don't like tofu. I've tried it a couple of times and the texture makes me gag. I love salads and vegetables but I can't live on salads and roasted vegetables forever.

Any advice from those of you who've been there before?

I like quorn mince for making lasagnes and chilli. I use sweet potatoes and chick peas as a curry base. Veg risottos are good. Co-op doing an amazing burger which tastes like bbq pulled pork and their bean burgers are good. I’m not veggie but these are things I like as part of my diet.

Get yourself some really gorgeous vegetarian cookbooks, maybe two or three, and promise yourself that you're going to only cook from those for a month. Once you've broken the habit of buying and consuming meat, it's plain sailing from there - or so I've found, anyway.

I absolutely love the following cookbooks:

• Healthy Indian Vegetarian by Chetna Mayan
• Simple by Yotam Ottolenghi
• The Green Roasting Tin by Rukmini Iyer
• River Cottage Veg series by Hugh Fearnely Whittingstall

I'm sure lots of other people can add their fav veggie cookbooks too...

Google veggie recipes for a couple of your favourite meals and try them out. When you've got those meals sorted try and add a couple more as vegetarian instead of meat. It's a process.

Are you going to eat cheese and eggs? My daughter is a vegetarian but doesn't like fake meat of any kind or tofu. She eats a lot of things like bolognese made with beans or lentils, mushrooms and so on and normally topped with some cheese. If she had roasted veg she would probably have it with halloumi or feta.

This is a good site for vegetarian recipes.

www.easycheesyvegetarian.com

Do it slowly. Have a meat free day once a week, then increase to two, three etc. Join some FB groups for food inspo. You don't have to like tofu but learning how to prep it might help - I prefer it firm, whereas my son eats it soft out of the packet. Marinating it overnight really helps too. Linda McCartney does lots of nice freezer meals, sausages etc which are nice. We pretty much eat the same meals as we were having before, just veganized: Chilli with extra beans but no mince (loads of protein and fibre in beans), spag bol with veggie mince, LM sausages and mash, mac cheese made with vegan cheese, chickpea tuna, pizza with vegan cheese, katsu curry with breaded tofu or seitan, thai green curry with stirfried tofu, fajitas or burritos with beans instead of meat, hearty veg soups and sushi. Honestly the options are endless, you're not limited by salad - we barely ever eat salad unless its with a bbq or as a side with soup!

I’ve been vegetarian for 55 years as soon as I realised what I was eating so no actual advice for you transition. There are lots of fake meats about these days but because they weren’t readily available when I became vegetarian I don’t eat them. I suppose my one piece of advice would be that it can be very easy to fall into the habit of eating a lot of highly processed foods and from the get go I would concentrate on eating healthily. There are Facebook vegetarian groups you can join who will have members who have more recently become vegetarian.
There are quite a few things which appear to be vegetarian but aren’t necessarily like cheese for example. Vegetarian cheese is easy to spot in U.K. supermarkets however. You need to decide how strict you want to be and be happy with that. I’m pretty strict but every little helps and we all do the best we can.
Good luck!

Obvs as a veggie you can add cheese, milk, eggs and honey into recipes which broadens your horizons even more.

I buy nothing ready made like quorn, I only eat home made food. They all have masses of sugar and salt.
You tube has all the vdseos you will ever need. Have a look. I think you will be surprised.
Try the tofoo company tofoo, smoked, its spelt like that. Its a solid tofu and is lovely. Some of them taste disgusting.

When my veggie adult son moved back home for a year over lockdown I learned to cook and like vegetarian food. Vegetarian is easier than vegan.
I dislike fake meat because of taste and the highly processed nature of it but will occasionally use a bit of soya mince. Quorn if you like it.

I started by trying to create vegetarian versions of meals we eat often. So using halloumi instead of bacon in a risotto. Lentils instead of mince in a ragu. Chunky root veg in a casserole instead of beef.
Increase herbs, spices and flavourings massively.

I have never mastered tofu though DS has finally managed it.

While you are moving over to giving up meat try buying higher welfare and reducing the portion sizes.

OP isn't limited to just smoked Tofoo, as nice as it is. Tofu is only disgusting if you eat it unprepared, which is the same as any meat? If you ate unseasoned chicken it wouldn't be particularly nice would it. Learn how to prep it properly and it's never disgusting.

Just do one month completely vegetarian and you won't want to eat meat again. At least that is how it worked for me. I did a vegetarian January and when that month was up I couldn't stomach putting meat into my mouth again.

You don't have to like tofu, but it is in a lot of veggie East-Asian food. How about paneer or halloumi?

I think the easiest things to make veggie are Indian, Italian and Thai. Especially if you want to avoid fake meat (which I recommend you do). It's great that you like vegetables. One of the nicest things I know is oven roasted root vegetables with crumbled feta on top. I usually eat that with a cauliflower steak.

I’ve been veggie for 25 years and never cooked tofu at home.

Green lentils are your friend. Use them as a substitute for mince. You can make a lovely lasagne/chilli/spaghetti bolognaise with them in the place of mince. Add a little marmite to get that slightly meaty edge. I have fake meat stuff sometimes but as it wasn’t a so readily available when I went veggie I never got used to it.

Why don't you write a list of your regular everyday meals then look at how you could adapt it to make it veggie.
Or write a list of veggie ingredients you enjoy then just put ingredients into a recipe search on the bbc good food website and filter for vegetarian dishes.

You need to eat a vegetarian and then your transition will be complete.

Just to add, tofu comes in all kinds of textures. For example silken tofu (which can be blended), puffy tofu, tofu skin ... check out an Asian grocery store !

The math doesn't make sense.
I think OP means that 40% of her meals have some meat/chicken, 30% have some fish, 30% have neither... how OP wrote 1st post implies that 40% of her calories are from meat/chicken, 30% is fish, 30% is vegetables.

Like there was never any junkfood, grains or dairy. That's what OP said.

Why not do it recipe by recipe, meal plan by meal plan. Personally, I never felt a need to substitute something for the role of the meat in the meal, but there are a lot of ideas how to give some other non-meat food a meat-type role, to take the "place" of the meat-fish-chicken OP wants to eliminate.

My fave EVER cookbook - so many lovely easy vege recipes to choose from, worth reading the foreword as well

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dr-Rupy-Cooks-Healthy-Flavour/dp/1529148839/ref=asc_df_1529148839?tag=bingshoppinga-21&linkCode=df0&hvadid=80264476829228&hvnetw=o&hvqmt=e&hvbmt=be&hvdev=m&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=&hvtargid=pla-4583863999154185&psc=1

Take it in stages. Try substituting beef products until you have a few regular veg substitutes. Then do the same with pork.... You don't have to go the whole hog and do it in one go.

Hi OP - I’ve been vegetarian for the last 17 years. It’s a lot easier than it used to be, especially eating out, but I totally understand the stress of trying to make the transition. Meals do require some more thought to make sure they’re balanced and you’re getting everything you need.

I’d give the following advice:

• HelloFresh / Gousto!! My household is a BIG user of HelloFresh (though I have heard Gousto is better for veggie recipes). I acknowledge meal boxes are expensive / a luxury BUT for this stage in your journey they could be very useful! HF have a weekly changing menu, and you can filter by veggie recipes. The majority of their veggie meals give you 3-5 of your recommended intake, and the portions for the veggie meals are much more generous than the meat meals. We always end up with a portion left over for lunchtime which is great. Do it for a few weeks and keep the recipe cards for the meals you like to then make yourself for cheaper
• You don’t have to go ‘cold Turkey’. Phase meat out slowly. Perhaps cut back to just chicken / white meat in meals for now (or just fish?!), and then slowly reduce this down
• Don’t beat yourself up if sometimes in your vegetarian journey you end up eating meat. It doesn’t mean you’ve failed - I found in my early 20s (after 7 years of no meat), I had a real sudden urge for chicken - so I had some! Ultimately it wasn’t as enjoyable as I expected it to be and also felt very ill afterwards (see below)
• After being meat free for a long period of time you will find if you do eat it then your belly can be quite upset / gassy / bloated. If I ever crave meat now I quickly remember how queasy it made me feel and I have no desire to try it again
• As others have suggested, meat alternatives are now readily available and can be good at helping you phase out meat. Personally, I don’t have any fake meat / meat alternatives and also hate tofu. The meat alternatives weren’t around when I went veggie either, but I gave meat up because I didn’t really like it. They’re highly processed so if you’re also considering a veggie diet for health reasons, these aren’t great
• Take multivitamins inc. iron!!! If you want to make sure you’re hitting your protein intake, try vegan / veggie proteins like Huel
• Remember that if you are doing this driven by your views on the meat industry, that consuming meat is far better than wasting meat. By this I mean, there will absolutely be times in your veggie journey that a friend forgets or a restaurant mishears and provides you a meat based meal. Don’t immediately refuse / send this back (albeit let them know the issue of course). I’ve ordered a veggie burger to be given a chicken one - bitten into it to realise my mistake. Sent back to the kitchen to be replaced, and only then did I really clock that the meal would be thrown away; an animals life just in the bin. So if this does happen to you, eat up or take away to give to someone else!

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Thank you, your post is a big help. I have a couple of vegetarian cookbooks but I'm not enthusiastic about their recipes.

Giving myself a month to cook only vegetarian is good advice. Thank you again.

I’ve been veggie for decades and the first year I’d just say “today I won’t eat meat”. After a while you lose your taste for it.

I love cookbooks and Asian food of any sort, so figuring out what to eat was easy.

As someone says above, tofu comes in a lot of textures. None of them bother me, but try the others and you may come around. In most dishes tofu just soaks up the flavour of the sauce. It doesn’t have its own flavour really.

Yes, I'll be eating cheese and eggs. I love both and will be an important part of my diet.

@RazzleDazzleDay I came to recommend EXACTLY the same books!