Veg out

What

Nothing beats a hearty vegan chilli, bursting with flavour and filling ingredients. Even if you can't resist the odd steak or a bacon butty, there are so many delicious vegetarian and vegan options around now, it's never been easier to make meat a treat.

You’ll improve your health, wallet and culinary expertise, and your carbon footprint, of course.

Why

Cows burp. A lot. And pigs eat. A lot.

A whopping 26% of global greenhouse gas emissions are from the food we eat, with animal products responsible for well over half of those emissions.1

Check out the chart on the right. For each step in the food chain, energy is lost. In other words, getting your energy directly from the source - plants - is far more efficient than getting it via animals.

And when you do feel like a meaty treat...from the money saved, you'll be able to buy higher welfare animal products - look out for grass fed meat which has a lower footprint than their intensively farmed counterparts.

“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” - Michael Pollan

How

You needn't become a die-hard vegetarian to reap the benefits of this Do Action (although don’t let us stop you!).

Going meat-free for a few days isn't too tough and (depending on your current meat-o-meter) could really shift the dial on your impact. (Just check out the Meat-Free Mondays campaign if you don’t believe us!)

And of course, you can use the money you'll have saved to buy some deliciously wholesome free-range or organic meat when it's time to treat yourself.

Delicious recipes:

References

  1. BBC
  2. WWF
  3. New Scientist
  4. NASA Earth Observatory
  5. JHSPH
  6. BBC Health
  7. The carbon and water data shown in the bar charts were prepared for our own footprint calculator by ERM, based on a combination of data from Defra (2006) Environmental Impacts of Food Production and Consumption; BDA - the Association of UK Dieticians Food Fact Sheet: Portion sizes; Defra Family Food 2017/18; and Audsley, E., Brander, M., Chatterton, J., Murphy-Bokern, D., Webster, C., and Williams, A. (2009) How low can we go? An assessment of greenhouse gas emissions from the UK food system and the scope to reduce them by 2050. WWF-UK.