sv evi

In mid December we were at a party, and I asked our friend Nic if he was a vegetarian like his partner Steph. He replied, “No, I’m on a meat token system.”

“Interesting, I’ve never heard of that, tell me more.”

Nic explained that the meat token system is his way of regulating his meat intake, because he doesn’t want to go all vegetarian, but he doesn’t want to eat tons of meat either. He gave the meat tokens their values (see next paragraph) based on the impact the animal has on climate change, with the publication of the report on climate change that came out last summer.

It works like this: you get 3 meat tokens a week, and can use them as you’d like. Chicken and fish are each worth one token. Pork is worth 2 tokens, beef is worth 4 tokens, and lamb is worth 6 tokens. So you could eat chicken once, pork once, and then the rest of the week eat vegetarian. But if you eat a hamburger, that uses all your tokens for one week, and into the next.

I was inspired. I went home from the party and did my meal planning for the week and decided to give it a try. Riki was wondering what was up when we had chickpeas 3 nights in a row. 🙂 So we have been doing the meat token system since December, although modified. Generally we don’t count meat that we eat at a restaurant towards our meat token total, it’s only the meat that we cook at home that counts.

Climate change is here for us all (for our children, and their children), and I think it’s important to make changes in my (our family’s) lifestyle in order to try to do our part to combat climate change. I have friends who have been vegan for 10 years or so, and Steph has been a vegetarian for 20 years—I’m not that radical or committed (and I like cheese too much), but it helps to at least be aware of what you put in your body and how that affects the planet. I guess eating meat twice a week is better than eating it every day.

We don’t own a car here in Cuenca, and we bike most places, which also helps keep our carbon footprint smaller than it was in the States.