Trying to cut back on eating meat?
You’re a reducetarian. Making the change has the support of others.
The Reducetarian Foundation encourages people to eat less meat, and there are a number of strategies to help them do so.
After giving up meat, Brian Kateman returned home to Staten Island, N.Y., for Thanksgiving dinner and under pressure from his family, he grabbed a piece of turkey.
“In that moment, my sister, as siblings will do, took the opportunity to call me out on it and said, ‘I thought you were a vegetarian, Brian,’” Kateman recalled. “I had a similar experience when I went out to breakfast with some friends, and I took a piece of bacon.”
He talked with his friend Tyler Alterman about the impact that these gotcha moments could have on people’s efforts to eat less meat. How could they provide affirmation and encouragement rather than holding people up to ridicule for their failures?
They decided that, like vegetarians and vegans, people in this group needed guiding principles and a name around which they could coalesce. The term “flexitarian,” they said, didn’t get across the idea of eliminating or cutting back on meat. They played around with all sorts of other words before deciding on “reducetarian.” Google searches showed no one else was using it, so they created the Reducetarian Foundation.
“We know that it can be challenging sometimes to make drastic changes to diet,” Kateman said. “So there was a real need to allow people to feel good about the fact that they were making a change in their diet, even if they weren’t perfect or pure. … The average American eats well over 200 pounds of meat a year, and so if a person was eating 10 pounds of meat in a year, why should we criticize them?”
The Ziegler household in Davis, Calif., has reducetarians of virtually every stripe. Jay Ziegler, who handles government relations for the Nature Conservancy, said he has cut back on red meat out of concerns about cholesterol. His wife, Carri, he said, doesn’t eat much red meat or pork because she doesn’t like either. Their teen son, William, is concerned about the environmental impact of factory farms and has reduced his consumption of red meat. Their daughter, Amelia, 20, is a vegan, so she doesn’t eat any animal products.
When it comes to meat consumption, Kateman said, it doesn’t have to be an all-ornothing choice.
“It’s a great thing if you become a vegan or a vegetarian because those are obvious ways to reduce personal consumption of animal products, but there may be some people who are not interested in veganism or vegetarianism at first,” Kateman said. “I wanted them to feel proud of the fact that they were taking steps, even if they hadn’t taken the last step. Just simply taking the first step was something we should celebrate.”
Sacramento resident Simeon Gant, executive director of Green Tech Education & Employment, gave up pork and meat for health reasons. He rarely cooks chicken at home out of concerns about salmonella.
“I felt like the food wasn’t fully digesting or going through my system,” Gant said. “It felt like it was clogged up in my chest area. I started eating more vegetables, and I felt like my flow became better. … I’m at least reducing my chances of getting cancer.”
People can learn more about the reducetarian philosophy at reducetarian.org.