Change starts one meal at a time

Did you hear the one about the vegetarian vampire? He only ate meat after sundown. It’s not a joke. It’s a practical suggestion from The Reducetarian Solution: How the Surprisingly Simple Act of Reducing the Amount of Meat in Your Diet Can Transform Your Health and the Planet (Penguin Random House, $30.95).

Reducetarianism, for the uninitiated, is the Next Big Thing for foodies whose sense of morality conflicts with their molars. That’s because, according to the movement’s founder Brian Kateman, reducetarians are realists. They want to save the world and bring an end to factory farming and animal cruelty, but occasionally they’d also like to eat a bacon buttie without being judged as morally weak and behaviourally inconsistent by tuttutting vegans and vegetarians.

‘‘Reducetarianism recognises that people are at different stages of willingness and commitment to eating less meat,’’ Kateman writes.

I’m one of those people. As a teenage vegetarian, I waged a war of passive resistance against my parents’ insistence I eat pork chops, mince on toast and plates of liver and bacon. When I left home, I ate only chicken and fish. I’ve never been game for duck shooting season, nor have I barbecued bits of wild Bambi or murdered a lobster for mornay.

Where and how do you draw the line is up to you, says Dale Peterson in The Reducetarian Solution.

Peterson, who calls himself a vegetarian, says his friend, British anthropologist Jane Goodall, occasionally scolds him for eating fish. ‘‘I am not an Absolute Vegetarian,’’ he writes. ‘‘It would be a mistake, I think, to view this lack of absolutism as a failure. The human condition is anchored in the idea of fallibility.’’

This year, my New Year’s resolution was to be mostly vegetarian and, mostly, I’ve stuck to it. I’m eating more salads than ever before – although there are only so many celeriac slaws a girl can stand – and I’ve found a friend in blood sorrel frittata. Also known as bloody dock or Rumex sanguineus, this red-veined bitter salad green is the only winter crop our free-range chooks haven’t annihilated.

I don’t eat meat every day, or even every second day. However, I still cook it for my husband and children and, when I eat out, I almost always order an eye fillet. Is that a cop-out?

Not at all, says The Animal Manifesto author Marc Bekoff, who argues that a slow transition is better than no transition. In Bekoff’s essay ‘‘Going Cold Tofu’’, he says we all need to ask, ‘‘Who’s for dinner?’’ not ‘‘What’s for dinner’’. ‘‘The billions of food animals killed to feed us are in fact sentient beings. Merely thinking of who might be winding up in your mouth is a helpful reducetarian strategy.’’

I live on a small farm. We run sheep and cattle and keep chickens and pet pigs. I have friends who only eat home-killed meat from animals they have nurtured themselves, but I can’t consciously make eye contact with my dinner.

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer described compassion as the basis of morality; I try not to think about the fate that awaits our fattened steers when they’re trucked off to the stockyards next week.

The politics of food can be fraught, but reducetarianism is all about setting manageable, actionable goals. Take it one meal at a time. Start with meatless Mondays. Order a smaller steak the next time you’re in a restaurant. Leave the luncheon sausage out of your kids’ sandwiches. Get a pet dog rather than a cat (man’s best friend is an omnivore with a palate that’s open to persuasion whereas moggies are ‘‘obligate carnivores’’). Make like Bill English and put pineapple instead of pepperoni on your pizza.

Break the habits of a lifetime. Change the order of the supermarket aisles you shop in, or the food stores you frequent.

‘‘Habit is the enemy of change. Luckily for us, surprise is the enemy of habit,’’ says psychologist and writer Tania Luna. ‘‘Google ‘factory farming’ or visit a slaughterhouse to shock your system.’’

Or become a vampire vegetarian, as espoused by treehugger.com founder Graham Hill. Hill is a self-described ‘‘weekday vegetarian’’ who chooses not to eat ‘‘anything with a face’’ from Monday to Friday.

‘‘Do what works for you,’’ he says. ‘‘Make consistent progress. Don’t stress out. Every bit helps.’’

Make like Bill English and put pineapple instead of pepperoni on your pizza.