Eating Less Meat For Completely Selfish Reasons
I personally don’t find abstract reasons motivating enough to permanently change my long-term habits, so I’m not going to subject you to them either. Selfish, gratuitous reasons are what help me stay on track.
When I’m picking a lunch spot to meet up with someone I haven’t seen in a while and I say I’d prefer somewhere that has good vegetarian options, the inevitable response is “Oh, I’m not vegetarian. Are you?” My answer: “Technically not, but I also don’t need to eat meat with every single meal.”
Nowadays, I eat around 95% vegetarian (that’s still 1 fleshly transgression per week!) and 50% vegan by meal frequency (2021 update: drifted to 99%+ vegetarian and 95% vegan), with the caveats that it’s easier because I live in a city near an inexpensive farmer’s market, and usually cook for myself. I hadn’t even started thinking about the vegan bit yet; the goal I set was simply to stop unintentionally eating meat that just happened to be there, which turned out to be a surprisingly ubiquitous phenomenon. I still indulge in occasional social meat; I’ve just cut out all the filler meat.
I’ve briefly thought about or attempted to go mostly-vegetarian several times before for ethical reasons, but quickly failed out of a combination of habit and sheer convenience; meat is everywhere in America. And when animals are raised in total isolation from human society and then delivered to your grocery store in neat little blood-free pink packages sealed in shiny plastic, the problem of consuming animal products is more a vague theoretical handwave in most people’s heads than an active thought process.
We’ve all heard the myriad ethical, health, and environmental reasons to stop supporting the meat industry. But as much as I would have liked to, I was never able to use these reasons to change my habits. I never made more than 1–2 days headway trying to use vague ethical and environmental motivators to go vegetarian. I decided I was going to go sideways and trick myself into eating less meat for purely selfish personal reasons.
If, unlike me, you are able to use personal health motivators to change your habits, Eating Animals (Jonathan Safran Foer) is a solid read on hard stats about the extremely disgusting factory farming conditions that the vast majority of animals raised for meat are subjected to. It has lots of exposés on the gnarly antibiotics and chemicals that are pumped into most of the meat you eat, and that you probably don't want in your body.Inertia and personal convenience were the biggest factors holding me back from cutting out animal products. So once I began reframing it from the perspective of increasing my own personal convenience, it was suddenly very easy to cut back, and my habits finally started to stick.
I hope that sharing some of these selfish reasons will help you find motivation if you’ve also been wanting to eat fewer animal products, but found yourself struggling.
My selfish, lazy reasons for eating less meat
Meat spoils 10x+ faster than non-meat
Most fruits and vegetables stay fresh and crispy for weeks in the fridge. Root vegetables last months unrefrigerated. Dried pasta, beans, flour, and grains will keep for literally years. Even soy meat (which has gotten much tastier in recent years) will easily last for a couple weeks in the fridge. It’s really convenient to be able to keep food around for so long and use different ingredients whenever you feel like it!
Meat has to be used up within just 2–3 days or it’ll go bad; I can’t believe I went this route for so much of my adult life. Yes, you can freeze it, but then you have to deal with the boredom/hunger of letting it defrost for an hour before you can use it, and I am too lazy for that. If you buy meat and then it spoils (which used to happen to me all the time), it’s a waste of your money and an annoyance, (as well as a waste of the animal it was butchered from).
This factor alone is so monumentally inconvenient that once I realized how big the difference was, my home cooking trivially became 100% vegetarian.
Meat is more expensive
Factory farming has significantly lessened this cost gap by growing animals under genetically and environmentally unnatural conditions, packed into minimal square footage with artificially accelerated meat growth. Although the cost margins are smaller when you pack animals into as tiny of a cage as possible, meat still requires orders of magnitudes more resources to produce than the nutritionally/calorically equivalent vegetable nourishment, whether you get it at the grocery store or whether someone else cooked it for you.
If your constraint is “meat” and you’re on a budget, your most inexpensive option is probably going to be chicken thighs or scraps every single time, but cooking vegetarian offers an ever-changing palette for your palate that gives you more flexibility and creativity. I really enjoy seeing what’s seasonal and cheap at the market that day, and assembling meals around whatever it happens to be. Will it be cauliflower? Snap peas? Sweet corn? A fun mystery vegetable I’ve never used before?
Fruits & vegetables make you feel fuller for longer
I have an outrageously fast metabolism, worsened by an almost-lifelong tendency to not eat very many vegetables. I’ve spent most of my life desperately snacking every few hours with rapid onset of hunger fugue if I don’t.
When I was omnivorous, I used to labour vehemently under the false assumption that I had to eat as much carne asada as possible to feel satisfied. Since I became 99%-vegetarian, I haven’t needed to snack as hard (fiber and water are filling), which is really convenient. Although protein makes you feel full (beans, cheese, and nuts are great), it turns out that bread and a crunchy apple will do the trick too.
After only ~6 months of being mostly-vegetarian, it felt like my gut flora successfully retrained themselves to not rely on meat for energy, because I just don’t get that same hit from it any more on the rare occasions I do eat it. Which makes it a lot easier to stay mostly-vegetarian!
Cooking without meat is so much faster and easier
Meat has to be monitored more carefully, and cooked longer and more thoroughly than other foods to kill certain bacteria. Tough cuts of meat need to be slow-cooked before they’re enjoyable to eat. A lot of meat needs to be marinated for a long time before it becomes delicious. Meat is tragically easy to overcook. Cutting boards and utensils need to be washed carefully after handling raw meat to avoid contamination. In summary, cooking meat is incredibly annoying.
Vegetables? You can eat most of them raw, and they won’t all be delicious, but almost none of them will harm you even a little. You can simply boil or steam most vegetables to make them fully edible and acceptable-tasting. But you can also turn practically any vegetable into a plate of delicious crispy-sweet-savory goodness by drizzling with oil, salting, and roasting.
You can literally just microwave potatoes and dress them up with fat and salt to make a delicious breakfast-of-champions worthy carbload. Heck, raw beets are amazing. So are chickpeas straight out of the can; I ate one out of boredom once when I was about to cook them and it was so tasty I just eat them as-is now, like a carby salad. Also, rice and beans are really filling and tasty.
Contamination has barely crossed my mind since I stopped cooking with meat and eggs. Instead of trying to viciously abrade every pore out of my raw-meat prep surfaces, I just wash my food and cutting boards until I don’t see or feel stuff on them any more, and that’s that.
Vegetables offer SO MUCH VARIETY
When I used to cook meat often, my dishes were all about how to enhance the meat flavor, what herbs to use on the meat, how to make the meat tender…
Meat can be delicious, but there really aren’t that many different meat flavors — and I’ve tried a lot more kinds of meat than your average American. Off the top of my head, there’s the white-meat flavor, the red-meat flavor, the gamey-meat flavor, the seafood flavor, the fatty flavor, the organ flavor, the cartilage flavor, and the gelatinous meat-near-the-bone flavor. I’m not counting niche stuff like brain because it’s really not very good — kind of chalky and bland? All the other unique flavors you associate with meat are ones that you impart from herbs, sauces, charring, smoking, etc, which you can do to the same effect without meat.
(Trust me; I have lived next to a fancy exotic meat store for a year and quickly found that I prefer non-exotic meat — alligator tastes like stringy chicken, kangaroo is super tough and dry, and snake is just uneventfully ok. Most of the delicious animals are the ones picked out and bred specifically for consumption.)
When I was more meat-focused, vegetables always existed, but they were rarely the focal flavor point. Now that I’m mostly-vegetarian, I’ve realized there are SO MANY different kinds of fruit and vegetable flavors to be creative with. Once I started cooking vegetable-flavor-centric dishes, I got way more creative with my flavor palate and started having a great time improvising. It’s like a continuous orgy of flavor discovery. Tangy? Earthy? Spicy? Umami? Jammy? Sweet? Sour? Any combination of the above? It’s all there amongst the things that grow out of the ground.
Vegetable-centric thinking opens up all sorts of flavor portals. Throw any random herb you’ve got lying around into the food processor and turn it into last-minute pesto. Caramelize a batch of onions and char a can of black beans with them to make a dish that hits the same dopamine buttons as short ribs with caramelized onions, without trying to imitate it exactly.
Vegetables are also super colorful and have lots of different textures! It’s a lot of fun to eat a crunchy spring rainbow instead of a greasy brown slab.
“Vegetarian” includes carbs and butter ;)
Ok, we’ve been disproportionately talking about cooking raw vegetables here, but quick change of topic. Assuming carbs and butter are not amongst your dietary restrictions: YOU STILL GET TO EAT CARBS AND BUTTER.
When many folks sigh that they could never be vegetarian, they’re imagining a grim food-binary with bacon and burgers on one end, anemic mixed-green salads with no nutritional value save a thin whisper of cucumber on the other, and an empty wasteland in between.
Don’t forget that the generous blanket of vegetarianism includes big honking hearty dishes like chili mac-n-cheese, lasagna, casseroles, biscuits, curry, quiche, potato hash, pastries, ice cream, and literally any fried thing that is not meat. You may already be eating vegetarian food you love ALL THE TIME without realizing it.
And once you start trying vegan substitutes for all of the above, you may realize: what the heck, these are really good?? Vegan food technology and Western vegan recipes have come a long, long way in the last decade alone.
Hot tips
Like I said, I wasn’t very successful the first few times I thought about going mostly-vegetarian, and even got sick on the second-to-last attempt because I was merely eating a meat-centric-diet-minus-the-meat, as opposed to an actual nutritionally balanced diet.
Meat eaters are conditioned to construct dishes around the meat, and cooking fake meat in a meat-centric framework is far less fulfilling than cooking based on whatever flavors and textures you have in front of you. Here are some tips to make your dietary transition more enjoyable.
Prioritize deliciousness
Whatever you do, do not look up “health food”; that is a surefire way to make you hate vegetables. No one wants steamed broccoli and overcooked underseasoned firm tofu on brown rice except as a form of self-flagellation.
Use more fat; it’s delicious. You also need it in your diet. Eating fat does not make you fat. Meat provides its own fat, but vegetables (usually) don’t, so it’s ok to break your intuition and use a lot more fat with vegetables than you’re used to using with meat. Coconut oil and sesame oil are particularly delicious ones. If you’re a sucker for the crispy crunchy savory aspect of meat, try roasted vegetables; they hit a lot of the same dopamine buttons as, say, maple bacon.
I hate most vegan food that attempts to imitate a specific meat dish, and I’m pretty sure no one really loves that genre. The best vegan food is accidentally-vegan food whose true goal is to optimize for deliciousness. If you ask, “How do I make a veggie version of [TRADITIONAL MEAT],” you will probably be disappointed that it doesn’t taste exactly like the completely different thing you were thinking of. If you instead just buy veggie ingredients and then think about what would make them taste best, you will be pleasantly surprised.
In a similar vein: American soy milk is really bland and boring. However, that's not what soy is supposed to taste like. The American market is presumably targeted at cow-milk drinkers, as it tries to strip out the potentially unfamiliar soy flavor and leaves you with a sort of thin, bland soup in the process. Soy milk from a Chinese grocery store is actually hearty, thicc, and delicious.
Don’t forget to salt your food! The correct amount is “to taste.” TASTE YOUR FOOD while deciding what to do with it. A judicious and tasteful salting will dramatically bring out flavors in the plainest vegetables.
Meat awareness
It’s relatively easy to cut meat out of your cooking. But outside the house, meat is so literally everywhere that it’s easy to eat it on accident, especially if you don’t pack your own lunch for work. Meat in America is opt-out, not opt-in.
In order to turn meat from a thing that’s just there into a conscious choice, you have to be aware of its presence. I started building awareness by jotting down a tally mark on a pocket notepad any time I found myself eating meat. I was shocked to find out not just how often I accidentally ate meat without thinking about it, but how often I ate meat and didn’t even get any enjoyment out of it.
Now, if you say you don’t want to give up meat because you love the decadent meaty treats of your cultural heritage, I spent a lot of time struggling with this and I completely understand. Decadence meat such as filet mignon, Peking roast duck, BBQ ribs, and chashu are an artisanal showcase of flavor, and a special treat which may be tied into nostalgic cultural associations for you.
But that’s very different from accidentally eating boring daily filler meat that you didn’t even enjoy, which is shoehorned into a lot of dishes just because it’s the norm. And when filler meat is cooked in such a way that you can’t taste the meat flavors, then why even bother? In many curries, stir-fries, and fast foods, the meat is so marinated or processed that the only flavor you taste is sauce; you could replace it with any textured protein and basically get the same experience.
So when I do eat meat nowadays, I’m more aware of it; it’s actually a conscious decision. A lot of Asian-American culture revolves around Asian food, and a lot of classic Cantonese-American food is really heavy on meat. (Honestly, I daydream of roast duck all the time.) When I choose to socially get Cantonese food with friends, it’s often implicitly bundled with a choice to eat meat.
But now I only eat opt-in meat instead of default meat. I’m thankful that I’ve built a much stronger awareness for my food, cut out all the boring filler meat, and have accidentally established a vegetarian default for the majority of my meals in the process. It’s hard to be perfect, but it’s easy to make a reduction, and you can make a huge reduction while still getting to eat your artisanal decadence meat.
Unfortunately, I’m nowhere close to being vegan because I heavily rely on cheese in my cooking [edit: I cooked vegan for most of 2023 and it was a great habit-breaker]. However, as I wrote this post, I realized that I haven’t built daily awareness for animal products yet, so I’ve accidentally defaulted to using plenty of animal products that have reasonable and tasty vegan substitutes, such as butter, eggs, honey, and cooking-cheese (a.k.a. cheese that’s going to get cooked down to a melty consistency such that its texture doesn’t matter). Gotta fix that!
Nutritional balance
Meat is an easy source of B-vitamins, so you might want to get a multivitamin supplement to patch that during the process of learning how to make nutritionally balanced vegetarian food. In particular, B-12 is hard to find outside of animal products, with the notable exception of nori (a type of seaweed). Fortunately, in modern times, you can get fortified food or eat your B12 in a delicious fruit-flavored gummy format (I like Vitafusion).
You still need protein and fat; you can’t just live on pasta. Beans, nuts, and legumes are easy sources of vegan protein. Cheese and eggs are easy proteins for non-vegans. And if you haven’t tried soy meat, give it a shot; flavor technology has vastly improved this decade. I really enjoy Trader Joe’s (incidentally) vegan chorizo not for it’s vegan-ness but because it’s ridiculously delicious and flavorful.
We could talk about the health benefits of dark leafy greens (which I have grown to enjoy), but I personally don’t find abstract reasons motivating enough to permanently change my long-term habits, so I’m not going to subject you to them either. Selfish, gratuitous reasons are what help me stay on track.
I’ll just slyly leave you with this tip about red chard, which tastes amazing, and not in that gnarly, punishment-health-food kinda way, but even to people who don’t love veggies. It’s like the red wine of vegetables, and is in fact frequently cooked with red wine. It also looks pretty.
Helpful cooking weapons
Steaming, blanching, and roasting are all minimal-effort, set-it-and-forget-it ways to make veggies delicious. If you don’t have time for that, there’s no shame in microwaving. I actually prefer to parcook hard root vegetables in the microwave before roasting, because the microwave takes care of them way faster than boiling and you can barely tell the flavor difference after the roasting step.
As Asian-Americans have known for decades, rice cookers aren’t just for rice; you can also cook any other grain or steam veggies in them. They’re great because you can literally just throw in your ingredients, press the button, and walk away without worrying about it boiling over. Imagine a slow-cooker…but fast. (Rice, beans, and cheese are an easy rice cooker meal, and an excellent vegetarian base to carry many other flavors.)
Be shameless
Meat is the norm. If you’re not used to having a dietary restriction, it can feel socially awkward to tell someone, “Hey, I, uh…would prefer to eat vegetarian, is there another option?”
It stops feeling like a big deal after you do it a few times. Really. If you’re worried about inconveniencing someone who was about to invest effort cooking/ordering food anyways into cooking/ordering a slightly different food, you can always offer to bring your own food.
Collect inspiration
Sometimes, the biggest blocker to eating vegetarian is simply knowing where and what your options are.
Personally, my favorite inspiration is the farmer’s market. Since college, I’ve enjoyed finding the seasonal mystery dollar special of the week and figuring out what the heck to do with it.
If you prefer your inspirations documented for your convenience, here are some of my favorites:
- Veggie Galaxy menu — my favorite diner and incidentally vegetarian restaurant all in one, with beer-battered onion rings so hearty I daydream about them when I’m far away. This place is my top pick for getting dinner with a consummate meat lover.
- Serious Eats — “Easiest Ever” (only 4 ingredients allowed)
This category isn’t strictly vegetarian, but like me, most of it is accidentally vegetarian…because cooking is easier without meat. - Southeast Asian flavor profiles. Even though a lot of dishes traditionally use meat, their flavor profiles actually make tofu taste artisanal, unlike the way American health food uses tofu as a punishment food. My particular personal favorites include spicy Vietnamese eggplants and every kind of Thai curry.
- Mexi-cali food — great at classing up a simple pile of rice and beans with all sorts of fun sauces and toppings
- Salvadorean food, especially pupusas
- Madrones, or fried ripe plantains, are literally candy
- Beets are also candy
- The Food Lab — Vegan Month
Labor-intensive, but tasty experiments in vegan cooking. I haven’t made specific recipes from this because I prefer the easy, accidental kind of vegan food, but if you like a high-effort recipe, look here.
Bonus random selfish less-meat reason: I made friends with a bunny in 2017.
Not a tip so much as an anecdote to illustrate how selfishness and personal hooks are some of the best motivators. I used to eat rabbit meat, but when I became friends with my housemate’s cute pet bunny, I immediately stopped because I knew I could never look him in the face with a clean conscience again if I ate another rabbit.
I continued regularly eating other non-friend animal species for some time afterward, but this friendship was a personal hook that forced me to examine my arbitrary mental partition between “food animal” and “friend animal”.
There are countless personal convenience reasons to eat less meat. They do apply to eating less animal products as well — my grocery bill and food-mental-overhead definitely got lower during the periods of time I was cooking vegan — but the payoff is not quite as epic as it is for dropping meat.
I would prefer not to support the milking industry, but it took me many years to kick my cheese craving vs. the few months it took to kick my meat craving. So I don’t have great tips for reducing animal-product consumption other than just finding a simple personal hook, like dating a vegan, cooking with vegan-ish friends more often, or making friends with a cow.
Enjoy going selfishly more-vegetarian-than-you-were-before!
