Shades of green

My mother stopped eating meat the day she found her pet duck hanging inside the window of a neighborhood butcher shop.

My friend went meatless approximately four seconds into a PETA video about slaughterhouses.

On my 16th birthday, I decided I, too, would become a vegetarian, although my decision was based on no particular reasoning aside from the trendiness it exuded in my teenaged mind.

I imagined creating green concoctions in the blender with ingredients that sounded like fashionable baby names — quinoa, kale, spirulina.

It should come as no surprise that I was a terrible vegetarian.

I know not eating animal protein is wonderful for a number of reasons — health, ethics, animal rights, economics, the environment, taste — yet, being a full-blown vegetarian never seemed to stick for me.

Luckily, there are benefits to reducing your intake of meat even if you aren’t a complete vegetarian.

Some may not be aware of the various states of semi-vegetarianism, or “flexitarianism” that exist between the seemingly black-and-white diets of meat-eaters and herbivores.

There are pescetarians, those who eat fish but no meat or poultry; pollotarians, those who eat chicken but not meat from mammals; and pollo-pescetarians, those who eat fish and poultry but no red meat.

I’m by no means advocating that everyone stop eating meat altogether, but by holding off on meat for a single day, you can still do a lot of good for both yourself and the environment.

So declares Meatless Mondays, a decade-old non-profit initiative aimed at reducing meat consumption. Meatless Mondays have been instituted at dozens of universities and public school systems across the country.

According to the campaign’s official website, if everyone in the U.S. went without meat for a single day, it could save an estimated 272 billion gallons of water and 233 million gallons of gasoline, since it takes significantly more natural resources to produce a pound of beef than it does a pound of soy.

While I by no means call myself a vegetarian anymore, to this day I’ve remained conscious of my intake of animal protein.

Even if you can’t kick your burger habit, going vegetarian for even one meal a week could do a world of good.

­— chkent@indiana.edu
Follow columnist Chloe Kent on Twitter @the_real_ck.