Reduce: Meat

This is another item that many people will find difficult to cut out or reduce but there are many good reasons for doing. Most people in Northern Ireland have not gone without meat for a single day of their adult lives.

Meat is expensive - it costs much more pound for pound than do most of the fruit, veg, grains or pulses that we eat.

Modern intensive farming methods mean that many animals lead miserable, unnatural lives. Learn more from VIVA, Compassion in World Farming and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

Animal production is much more wasteful of land and resources than arable farming. Globalisation means too that the meat you eat often started life on the other side of the world. For example much of the lamb and mutton consumed in the UK comes from New Zealand - even though our climate is fine for sheep rearing. Think of how much waste is involved in bringing meat half-way across the world when the same product can be got right on our doorstop.

We don't need to eat meat to live. Something does not have to be killed to keep us alive. Admittedly no food production is completely free of causing harm to other beings, it is much easier than it has ever been to experience a rich, varied, tasty and healthy vegetarian diet.

You don't have to adopt a full-on vegan lifestyle overnight, try not eating meat every day (easier when you're broke) to begin with, make an effort to understand how those sausages, rashers or chicken nuggets are made, the lives (and deaths) of the animals from which they come. Also a little education into the delights of meat slurry and mechanically recovered meat used in many processed meat products may help you to reconsider you attachment to animal flesh.