Day 57: screw it

at home there was chicken for dinner
i ate it
it was good

Day 56: all you can eat sushi

Mostly fish, some chicken, yumyum!

Day 55: Tulips from amsterdam

Spent a day in Amsterdam, funfunfun.
bami with chicken and some shrimp springrolls for lunch from the market in Jordaan.
And chinese take-away for dinner, pork and chicken.
so meat with pleasure yet no beef which is the worst offender when it comes to producing greenhouse gasses.

Day 54: a week of succes

Today i ate several meat-free baguettes
so given that monday got switched with sunday, a week of 5 out of 5 without meat!
yay, and i'm still alive and feeling good!
Imagine that!

Day 53: out for lunch + fruit

Breakfast: leftover potatoes and apple sauce from yesterday
Lunch: out with Sven, a croque monsieur without ham
And i also had brought fruit with me from home, a banana and an apple which i ate at 11 and 5.
And when i came home after tai chi class .. some doritos :-) but not too much

Day 52: baguettes

Bought 2 baguettes, one for lunch and one for 5 o clock.
Smos kaas and Brie with honey.
No real dinner i can remember

Day 51: Exki

While i was out and about i indulged :-)
a vegetarian salad with fried tofu, yummy stuff
and a dark raisinbread - baguette with goat's cheese and sundried tomatoes
all at Exki, a pricy store but nice food.
Everything else was ok too.

Day 50: steak

Since i switched yesterday with today (is that legal? Guess so :-))..
i ate a smos chicken curry for lunch and a steak in the evening
yumyum

Day 48-49: some meat

Although the weeked is the time for compensating the week by throwing a big meat-fest ... that doesn't seem to happen.
I think i ate some chicken on saturday morning, then a smos kaas for lunch and in the evening i went to a wedding that was completely vegetarian! Lots of yummy moroccan foods and quiches.

On sunday no meat at all because i'm switching with monday because my sister will be making steak :-)

Day 47: More succes

Smos kaas for lunch and something with rice, bananas, grapes and mushrooms for dinner, i passed on the chicken (don't know what that combination was, my sister made it, strange but not bad.)

Ok 2 out of 5, thats better than 1 out of five :-)

Day 46: Succes

Smos kaas & broccoli-soup for lunch and no real dinner (cent wafers are vegetarian :-))

Day 45: a few tiny pieces of ham

My sister made a fresh pizza for dinner, everything homemade, with fresh tomatoes and everything, very nice stuff!
She didn't put ham on my quarter but in the end i ended up with a bigger piece than 1/4 and at both edges i found a few pieces of ham ... and ate them.
So no complete succes and actually no meat was "not-consumed" (if you get what i mean) because she hadn't bought less meat than for all of us, she just put the 4/4th of the ham on 3/4 of the pizza.
So no actual reduction.

Day 44: i tried, they failed me

Smos kaas for lunch and then for dinner i went to Sven & An and we ordered pizza @ Pizza Hut,
i ordered a vegetarian one, but when we opened the boxes at their house, there were 3 pizza's with meat inside .. so i tried but didn't succeed.
I did enjoy the bbq-pizza very much :-)

Day 43: started good ... then ate chicken and ham

For breakfast my sister remembered my vegetarian adventure so there were mushrooms in the omelette she was making. Good of her!
For lunch: smos kaas
And then for dinner my sister made cordon blue .. and i ate it, would have eaten it in the morning anyway
I need to provide her some vegetarian recipes :-) !!

Day 41 & 42: hmmm meatballs

that is all :-)

Day 40: And another big meat-fest

Went to Fogos with friends = lots of argentinian meat!
No serious veggie options available in that restaurant.

Day 39: again mega-dinner

For my going away party at work we went to have a traditional chinese dinner.
Lots of pork, chicken, beef, fish, shrimp and duck!
Big chinese feasts are not the time to go vegetarian :-)

Day 38: A day off

sorry, don't remember,
could have worked, couldn't, no idea

Day 37: big big dinner at work, mega-fail

For lunch there was a huge buffet, lots of meat :-/
But very yummy :-)

I had actually arranged the buffet myself and could have made it so that at least have the food was vegetarian, thought of it too late.
He/she who has the power needs to make the choice to make vegetarian items readily available, so the all the eaters have to do is choose at the table.

Day 36: cleaning and studying en doing an exam

Cleaned out our garage, no meat there,
studying, no meat,
before exam got bread, egg salad and fruit, so no meat there either!
succes

Day 34-35: Uneventful weekend

Amongst other things:
- free small baguettes with chicken curry and ham at the red cross duty-thing
- chicken in a big spring rol and ham on a pizza

Day 33: Double fail

Very busy day, so at lunch i took a simple solution, lasagna bolognese, with ground beef. Yummy but not allowed!
And then late in the evening after training went for a "mitraillette" with one of the bro's, thus eating chicken, bad bad me!

Day 32: no probs, and then oops

The day started out great with that yummy baguette from last night that i salvaged from the frigde, salad bar with feta!

Then for lunch there was a vegetarian dish available, check!

And then in the evening i went to the graduation ceremony of students from the courses i will be managing in my next job starting next week, and there was a reception ...
Wasn't interested in fishing out the "veggie-or not" bits so i ate a bit of trout-mousse and some chicken curry, the rest was ok i think.

So apart from a few grams of fish and chicken, today was ok.

Day 31: lots of leftovers

For breakfast I started the day with several hamburgers that were over from last night. So on the one hand that's good because eating something veggie while throwing away meat... that's stupid and in the end even more resources are being used. On the other hand, those burgers were cooked with me in mind, they already had my name on them in the evening... so actually I didn't eat leftovers in the morning, I merely postponed eating the This werkmeat from the evening. This will improve over time with properly informing the family, or with moving out ofcourse.

For lunch i chose a feta-salad, I wonder if that's an intended timing by the chef so that more days have a vegetarian option?

And for dinner i had made a baguette with the leftovers from the salad, yumyum, but i forgot it at work in the fridge :-(
So for dinner i ended up eating half a meal of not so yummy whole grain rice with some fruit out of a can and not the fishsticks that were made for me. Yep, a talk with the family is needed.

Why again am i doing this?

My own health and putting in my 2 cents against climate change.

Take a look at this talk by Jeremy Rifkin, if you don't have time, skip to 17:19 and you'll know why and why it's so important to reduce my beef-intake.



If you have a little more time, please watch the whole thing, its a vitally important message for our future!! Seriously it's a good and inspiring talk!

Day 30: succes

no breakfast so no sinning there :-)
For lunch i ate a vegetarian pasta, thanks to the restaurant at work, good stuff, need to learn how to make that.
For dinner my sister made a bunch of hamburgers, and i succesfully fought the desire to eat one, boy that wasn't easy.
I think i even almost licked one, just for the taste of it, the meat dealers have there claws deeply locked into me :-) but i prevailed!

ps: tomorrow morning i ofcourse will have to eat some of those burgers as leftovers, we can have waste, no sir!

Day 29: i worked hard, gimme meat :-)

Holiday today, a friend came over to help with the post-fire cleanup, we each spent about 5 hour in the bathroom, scrubbing every surface about 4 times.
So i ate chicken curry on a piece of bread because i wanted to :-p
And since the veggie-day was screwed anyway, i joined the family in eating spaghetti bolognese, containing a small amount of ground meat.

Let me point out here that i'm not eating steaks or whole chickens when i'm breaking the rules :-) my meat intake is still pretty low.

Day 27-28

Over the weekend I didn't binge on meat, some meaty charcuterie, and a roasted chicken for the whole family, that will be about it methinks.

Day 24-26: ehm think it was ok and then everything failed

don't remember wednesday, probably was ok.

Between wednesday and thursday we had a fire in the house (3 o clock at night), oops, got lucky that the fire was noticed by other people who woke us up or we all might have died.
During the time after the fire I ate pastry and "smos kaas", in the evening (we could stay in the house, but no electricity or gas) we ordered home delivery: I dutyfully ordered a vegetarian dish but without realising it at the time, I ate some of the chicken starter :-)

Friday i started with chicken leftovers from yesterday (say NO to waste!), had a vegetarian salad-bar lunch with a "roggeverdommeke" and for diner said "screw it" and bought some hot pita-chicken sandwiches for the family cause they are warm and yummy, and i was driving my bike through the cold and rain.

Day 23: vegetarian canneloni

At least i think that's what it was, it was vegetarian, and tasted good, gogo restaurant!

Day 22: hmmm turkey

In the restaurant at lunch: not a single vegetarian option except salad-bar, but the turkey "pavé" looked so good :-) and i didn't bring bread to go with it.

And since today is a fail anyway, ate spaghetti bolognese in the evening :-)

Week 3: 4 out of 5 ain't bad

Monday and tuesday: salad bar at work
Wednesday: "vol-au-vent" :-p
Thursday: had a great day in Gent and nice vegetarian food
Friday: don't remember but it was "legal"
Saturday: BBQ
Sunday: Vol-au-vent

Day 12: ehm ... don't remember

oops been slacking, i'm sure i tried good :-)

Day 11: hmmmm bacon, almost

For lunch i was on an external provincial location, there was a restaurant and we had soup and a buffet.
Them soup was good, unfortunately there were lots of bacon-bits in it, afterward i found out there was a vegetarian option, so i could have succeeded but ddn't investigate enough.
The buffet had sufficient opportunities to eat cheese and vegetables, no problem there.

Day 10: Again meaty leftovers

For breakfast i had family-leftovers: spaghetti bolognese with 2 fish-sticks (don't ask)
Then for lunch all went well: vegetarian pizza
And for dinner a baguette with cheese and vegetables

10 days and i'm not dead (yet)
maybe eating a lot less meat is possible after all ;-)

Day 9 (part 2)

The rest of the day went well:
Vegetarian dish for lunch: stuffed paprika with something yummy, think tofu or quorn, unfortunately the rest of the dish wasn't great, green beans that were actually white, mashed potato and a tomato sauce that was too sour

For dinner i had a great tomato and mozarella sandwich with extra vegetables on top (cucumber, corn and carrots), yumyum!

Day 9: i will not waste good meat

Yesterday my family had the same dinner with chicken added on top.
There were leftovers so i pulled everything togehter, including a few pieces of chicken, and i'm eating that right now for breakfast.

So it won't be a veggie-dag but i won't have thrown away perfectly good pieces of chicken either, so no bad feelings, just no perfect score :-)

By the way, it's 10 o clock in the morning here, not whatever tim is attached to this post

Day 8: succes

Eggs on bread for breakfast, check!
Nothing veggie available at the restaurant for lunch so went out and bought a baguette with vegetables and cheese and a vegetarian pizetta, check!
For dinner some mozarella with cheese, mashed potatoes and omelette, check!

Soon i'll have to take a good look if i'm getting in all necessary nutrients, but i actually needed to do that before this quest so nothing new :-)

Day 6 & 7: The biggest meat-eating fest in history?!

One would think that after the first week of trying to eat vegetarian -that all things considered went well because very little meat was eaten- a binge meat-eating session would ensue!

Nothing of the kind, over the whole weekend actually nothing un-vegetarian was eaten!

These 2 days were actually the 2 first real vegetarian days!
So it can be done, onwards!

Day 5: Opportunity creates the criminal

Pistolets with cheese or speculoos-paste for reakfast, check
Salad-dish with cheese for lunch, check
Tiny piece of salmon on the cheese dish, fail

One colleague suggested fish doesn't count toward my quest.. i don't agree.
Meat or fish both need to eat something else before they're big and juicy, they're both on a higher trophic level than "plants" and in these times most fish is probably even more unsustainable than most types of meat.

Anyway, my truly vegetarian colleague even gave me her piece of salmon so i had 2 :-)
And another colleague offered to eat my salmon so i would succeed today yet i decided to eat it anyway to prove a point:

Oppurtunity creates the crime, being a weekday-vegetarian would be very easy for me if the choice was available!

First week: 0 / 5
Better luck next week!

Day 4: Between a rock and a hard place

When I opened the fridge in the morning there was a big bowl leftover pasta bolognese, you know, the accidental meat i ate yesterday.
I was torn ... I know from past discoveries in our fridge that this would most likely not be eaten by anyone else and thus would end up in the trash.

Given that i'm partly doing this to reduce my ecological footprint I decided the best choice would be to eat it and not eat some extra food while this would end up being thrown away.

So failed again yet with good reason.

Day 3: Old habits die hard

Today at lunch i did well!
Since there was no vegetarian meal available, i went out and bought a very nice vegetarian baguette with grilled courgettes, pesto and lots of other yummy stuff.
And in the afternoon i also got a fruit-salad from a colleague that wasn't hungry for it.

And then ...

Completely oblivious of my weekday-vegetarian adventure i ate a big plate of spaghetti bolognese (ground beef) for dinner and later at night in a bar i ordered a croque-monsieur (ham)... only to realise late at night when i got home again that ... OH DAMN i was trying to be a weekday vegetarian!!
So i started up this blog at that point to keep track of it all!

Better luck tomorrow!

Day 2: succes ... almost

Every tuesday, the pasta dish in the resataurant at work is a vegetarian one.
Sometimes that meant that the pasta with ham and cheese became pasta with cheese, not bad but not great.
Today it was an nice vegetable sauce with tomato, lots of variety in the sauce, it was yummy.

Unfortunately there were small meatballs in the tomato sauce ... failed again!
On to day 3!

Day 1: May 16, 2011, Monday

Day 1: oops, apparently i didn't feel like starting just yet
At lunch in the restaurant i chose te eat a "Cordon Bleu", you know, a schnitzel with ham and cheese inside.

Let's see what tomorrow brings!

Something that's worth doing ....

With something that's worth doing, is worth starting it slowly!

It hasn't been going great yet,
but i'm happy that i've started reducing my meat intake significantly.
Tonight I'll start posting about what happenend this week.

Ready ... set ... GO

A week or so ago i found this lecture on TED:
http://www.ted.com/talks/graham_hill_weekday_vegetarian.html

Graham describes my situation pretty good:
- wanting to eat less meat for health and environment
- not wanting to give up meat completely
- not getting around to it because of the abovementioned dilemma and the lack of a plan

But after seeing yet another mind-expanding TED-lecture, i once more have a new perspective on reality from which there is no return :-)

So gogogo! I kinda started 2 days ago on monday and will keep a diary here and add random but relevant stuff.