In the inaugural post of my new blog, I’m going to talk about one of my passions, eating. I love to eat and cook.
About 2.5 years ago, my then 9 year old daughter (and quickly followed by then 7 year old son) decided to become pescatarians. They’d be talking about it for sometime and several of their friends were already veggie or pesky (actually nearly all of them were pesky when they wanted to be…), so they had a groundswell of support.
Since then, my wife and I have gradually reduced our meat in take, until just before leaving on holiday this year we decided to dive right in and join them on the journey.
Given my work in trend analysis and research in food lifestyles (amongst other things), I’m well exposed to the growing movement in the UK to reduce meat consumption (flexitarianism), but also the research to support its benefits.
It has to be said, I’m a big believer in a good balanced healthy diet coming from healthy home cooked food whenever possible, whether with meat or without. With as much knowledge about the provenance of food as possible, buying local when you can.
But the growing concerns about the environmental impact of eating meat was what had really swung my decision making. As with the balanced diet, I fully appreciate there’s two sides to every argument and as with meat there are vegetarian ingredients that have their own negative environmental concerns. But on the balance of things it felt it was the right thing to do at the right time.
All of this things said, one thing I was fully aware of (partly down to the research work I’d done), was that by opting to have a pescatarian diet I wasn’t guaranteeing myself a healthy diet, and this I feel is a common misconception, that in part isn’t helped by the supermarkets placing all of their vegetarian food in the “Healthy Options” aisle – the two are not necessarily the same.
There are plenty of prepared vegetarian alternatives that content heavily processed and at times unhealthy ingredients
Either way, this is the start of a new route for me and the family as a whole now going forward. I had been veggie for several years in the past, but then had returned to eating meat.
As I do nearly all of the cooking in the family, this has impacted me the most, in terms of changing behaviour. So what’s changed since we made the choice…
I’ve had to alter my sources for cooking inspiration. We’re big curry fans (well the adults – although the kids are growing fans too) and most of our favourite recipes used meat, mostly chicken. This is ironic given the grand heritage in vegetarian food from Asia, I suspect it’s demand for meat from the Western culture cooking book sector, that has driven this recipe imbalance.
We’re/I’m thinking more about the constituent parts of each recipe. We all do a lot of sport and physical activity and food and what we eat plays an important role in our physical development (particularly for the kids) and our body’s ability to repair itself. So where we’re going to be getting our proteins from in particular has been a focus. I’ve always paid attention to this, but my attention has become more attuned.
The source for our vegetables. We’d been buying free range and high animal welfare meat for sometime, but now we’re solely buying vegetables and fish, we’re focussing our attentions on this aspect more. Opting for an organic vegetable provider that delivers is on the cards and we’re becoming much more attentive to the sustainability of all the fish we buy.
Frozen veg. We’d been using them for a while, but now we’re using them more often. We don’t live near many shops, so it often requires planning to get fresh vegetables. Frozen veg gives us the option of storing “fresh at point of freezing” vegetables in our freezer space and out of other cupboards. Whilst there’s still seems to be some snobbery around frozen veg over fresh, I’m all for them and from what I’ve read they are likely to contain a great depth of nutrients than fresh veg due to being frozen at their peak nutrient level, versus having to be shipped and then sitting on shelves gradually deteriorating, as fresh veg are.
Anyway, it’s the start of a new era in our family. I’ll let you know how it shapes up and what other things we encounter. I’ll also share any nice recipes I come across or adapt as we go.