Meat free January

Happy new 2012 to you! Fresh from my recent spate of blogging, I thought I'd open my 2012 account with one on the first day to explain why I'm going meat free in January.

It was an idea planted by one of my friends at the European thing I went to in May. Liv is vegetarian and challenged us at the end of the conference to have a vegetarian day at the conference. She pointed to the environmental impact meat production has on the world as reason enough to do it for one day in the week long conference. (You can do your own internet searching on this. I did and there's a load. Here's one called 'Veguary' (think a vegetarian Movember in February) which sums it up quite well here, although the stats are US based. In short though, it seems to me not to be a bad thing to cut down on meat eating. Just like it's not a bad thing to cut down your bottled water consumption when you have a tap with perfectly clean, safe water.) Anyway, it was a very short point Liv made, but she persuaded me and I hoped at the next conference we have vegetarian day.

Cut to a few months later and I found my old diary. I had once tried to be a vegetarian (20th October 1990, fact fans). "Huh. I never really did that."

Then I saw Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall on The One Show. He was on to promote his vegetarian cookbook. No big deal, not really interested. But then he said in research for writing the book he became a temporary vegetarian, I think for three months. "Oh. A temporary vegetarian". (In the movie of my life this will part will have a montage of flashbacks to the earlier incidents.)

Now, here's the important bit, I still might not have done anything about it until I was out for dinner later that week with Karen Photographer for her gallery opening. I mentioned what I had seen on The One Show and Karen decided to join me in a month-long vegetarian adventure (Karen will have her own reasons for the challenge, I think mostly she likes a challenge - see marathon).

As it was already into November, we'd kind of missed the boat on that month, and December is just a crazy month to try to go cold turkey, so to speak. January has the new start feel to it and would give us time to research a little bit about what we need to do.

So that's it really.

Last week Karen and I renewed our pact to do it with a high five. That made it official, cos we're a bit street. And I've marked recipes from my cookbooks and gone to the brilliant BBC Food website. I see that herbs and spices are going to be important. Well vegetables can be a bit boring, can't they? And I'll need to keep myself in fresh vegetables and eat a lot of beans and what not to keep my protein levels up. But I'm happy to report 18 hours in, things are going swimmingly. Mostly because I'm a bit sick and haven't tried to eat anything substantial, but it's nonetheless encouraging.

I wouldn't have tried to do it without any one of those four things: Liv, my old diary, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Karen (although if I had to grade them, my diary is probably the least important and Liv and Karen the most).

I'll probably put some stuff on here about it, but we'll also be tweeting our vegetarian adventure at #meatfreejanuary. We're not private on there, but if you have an account you can tweet us encouragement. Or try to make us feel better if we succumb to a big dirty burger or a fry, or some ribs. Or a Chinese...

I need to get me some butternut squash or something. Quick.