3 Lessons from Becoming 94.8% Vegetarian

It may be a stretch to say that those willing to try human meat outnumber those willing to give up all meat entirely. But it’s safe to say that making vegetarians out of America’s meat eaters faces stiff headwinds. As a carnivorous environmentalist, I epitomize this challenge. I am all too aware of the environmental and animal welfare impacts of eating most meat. But, until this project, I had a hard time giving up slow-smoked pulled pork, fall-off-the-bone baby back ribs, or my mom’s generations-refined lasagna (that last one remains a sticking point…).

So, 10 years ago I embarked on a data-driven experiment to significantly reduce the meat that I eat without going cold turkey. In addition to achieving some dramatic results, I gleaned the following three insights from my endeavor.

1.????The act of measuring led to deliberate decision making

The simple process of recording my meals has required making conscious decisions over literally every meal choice I make. This deliberateness has brought to the front burner considerations about my next meal that have become, with the rise of commercial-scale food production, all too easily removed from our dining experiences. Though not sufficient to change behavior, this awareness is a critically necessary first step.

2.????The act of measuring led to addictive game dynamics

The more I tracked my meals, the more I became hooked on improving my stats. This competitiveness achieved what my nagging conscience and litany of facts hadn’t. In keeping with a key tenant of gamification, around day 100, I added 50-day increments, establishing discrete periods against which to compare my progress. Without explicitly setting any targets, the goal quickly became for the current period to outperform the previous one. And as the data illustrate (see below), my progress took off with the advent of this game-within-the-game.

3.????Flexibility trumps stubbornness

This approach affords those of us ambivalent about eating meat the ability to still indulge while significantly reducing the overall meat consumed. Psychologists and behavioral economists have devoted much research to the impact of the “default effect” or “choice architecture” on our behavior (e.g., having the default be opting into funding our 401(k)s or using the cold- instead of hot-water setting on our washing machines). This process switched my default from meat to vegetarian, a default I override, increasingly rarely, only when there’s a compelling gastronomic case to do so. And building a stockpile of vegetarian tallies has allowed me to enjoy such exceptions without feeling (too) guilty.

To the Numbers!

I have dramatically changed my eating habits. Most notably, I increased my vegetarian meals from just under 50% at the start of 2012 to a nearly 90% (89.3% to be precise) overall average for the last ten years. As notably, after an initial spike by the end of year one, I really hit my stride in year six, with the last five years consistently coming in at 95% vegetarian (+/- ~0.2%). It’s pretty clear to me that, absent going 100% vegetarian, this is about as far as I can push it while still allowing for some sustainably-sourced fish and the infrequent all-out carnivorous splurge.

Ten-Year Trends

The following graph, with vegetarian and veg+poultry+sustainable removed, provides greater detail on the more tightly bunched other categories.

Ten-Year Trends without Vegetarian and Veg+Poultry+Sustainable

(note: to reduce clutter, sustainable pork and sustainable beef weren’t included in the graph as they each made up only 0.1% of the total).

And finally, a breakdown by each year as well as the averages for the full 10 years.

Yearly Breakdown & Overall 10-Year Averages

It’s worth noting that my year-one results would have been even more dramatic had I not been less rigorously considering these matters leading up to this effort. Poultry takes the greatest hit by far because I had already begun the shift away from beef and pork to chicken before “day 1”.

If you’re going down this road, keep these three tips in mind

While going cold turkey may be daunting, as the growing popularity of efforts like “meatless Mondays” illustrate, there is an appetite to curtail our meat consumption—driven by the dual motivators of minimizing environmental impacts and the horrors inflicted on “our livestock”, which is to say animals, of factory-scale meat production. So for anyone who wants to become more deliberate about what you eat but may not be ready or interested in going 100% vegetarian, I strongly encourage you to do something like this exercise.

It needn’t be complicated. I created a simple spreadsheet to track my meals and kept these three don'ts in mind:

1.????Don’tworry about meal quantities. So long as it was substantial enough to serve as a meal, I counted it as variations averaged out over time (though breakfast may or may not be the most important meal of the day, to avoid padding the stats, I didn’t include breakfast unless I was eating).

2.????Don’t get too granular. I tracked meals no more granularly than: vegetarian, poultry, beef, “sustainable” beef, pork, “sustainable” pork, seafood, and sustainable seafood. If any of those was a featured meal component, I counted the entire meal accordingly.

3.????Don’t sweat the non-material details and do be rigorous about the ones that matter (for you). I didn’t develop a detailed framework for defining sustainable beef or pork because they represent a negligible percent of my diet. If a restaurant or packaging had a clear description of the animal rearing practices (e.g., local, free range, grass fed, etc.) I counted it, if not, I didn’t. But for seafood, where the grey areas are as numerous as the opportunities to make educated decisions, I used the highly reputable Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch guide smartphone app to inform my choices.

Hopefully this provides some food for thought!