I'll start off by saying that I personally am not a vegetarian, however I recently found out some facts about vegetarianism which have made me want to cut down my meat consumption. In this post I'm just going to summarise some reasons you might not have considered for and against being vegetarian.
A lot of people go vegetarian for ethical reasons (they don't like animals being killed), religious reasons or just because they don't like the taste of meat. I recently discovered another good reason to go vegetarian. This document explains how our meat consumption contributes to global warming and to slow down climate change, we should become vegetarians.
Cattle produce up to 250L of methane everyday, plus many fields used for grazing were originally forests which would've taken in more CO2 than grass does. If we reduce our meat consumption, less cattle and other livestock will need to be kept so the land they grazed on can be used to plant trees etc.
On the other hand, if we didn't eat any meat, no livestock would need to be kept at all. It would be so much more rare to go for a walk in the country side and see sheep or cows. They would probably be kept in zoos. Many farmers and people involved in the production of meat would lose their jobs.
If you want to try and eat less meat, you could try making lentil bolognaise with pasta instead of normal spaghetti bolognaise with mince (I tried it, it's delicious!) or have a chickpea burger instead of a beef burger (I have tried this one too, and although it doesn't taste like a beef burger, it tastes really good anyway). The good thing about those two recipes is that they are still high in protein despite not containing meat. Chickpeas and lentils are very high in protein so are good for using instead of meat.
Thanks for reading x
