OK so lots of people reading this may be big meat eaters. I used to eat meat when I was young and in fact didn’t become a vegetarian until I was an adult. When I was a child some people laughed at vegetarians, or thought they were just weird. How things have changed. Now lots of people are slowing down how much meat they eat. Some people are cutting it out completely, because these days there are so many other delicious things to eat. Other people are vegans – I’m one of them. Which means that they only eat foods that come from plants. Plant-based food. You have probably seen it. There is more and more of it everywhere. The invasion of the plant-based foods. Albi says ‘ Mooooray..!! ‘

This is a meat-free burger. I think it tastes better than meat. It has vegan cheese on it. I ate it in a restaurant called Bill’s in a town called Lewes. Doesn’t it look delicious? Well, there’s loads of plant-based food out there if you want it. And it’s really exciting because every day new kinds are on the shop shelves. This is because all over the world people are making an effort to move to plant-based foods.

I think lots of people are thinking more about the animals more than they used to. It has maybe struck them that they actually don’t want to eat them as much or at all, and also many are learning how meat is very bad for the environment. Let me explain how.

A BIG CHUNK of all greenhouse gases, the nasty gases that are heating up our planet and causing global warming and climate change come from a thing called animal agriculture. That’s farming to do with animals. What is shocking is that most of these gases are coming from COWS who make HUGE amounts of the worse gas, METHANE. It comes out of their mouths when they burp. BURP BBAUUUURP BHHHUUURRPHP. This methane is warming our planet. There are one and a half billion cows on the planet and they are all burping like champion burpers.

Look at this. This bubble shows all the bad gases humans are puffing up into the air around the world that are making climate change worse. The whole bubble of gas that the world is making is 100% .. When you look at it like this you will see that 14.5%, which is the slice part, is a BIG amount and as I said it is coming from animal agriculture. And COWS make most of this, yes, you remembered, with all their METHANE burping. So every time humans use things from cows, whether meat or milk or cheese or butter, they are making this big bad bubble of gas worse.

‘HANG ON!’ I hear you shout. ‘So IF humans could slow down or even cut out using cows for meat or dairy, milk, cheese, butter, could we make this bad bubble of gas smaller?’

You got it. Yes! It’s amazing, isn’t it? Just by changing the way we eat, just a bit or even, a lot, then we can help stop climate change happen.

AMAZING, amazing, amazing, wonderful. ‘MOOOOOOOOVERLOUS’ says Albi.

It is very difficult to not eat these things, to start with, if you aren’t already vegetarian or vegan. But we can all try at least a bit, and if EVERYONE in the world made an effort, even for only one day a week, so that we didn’t need to have so many cows, and so there were less cows on the planet burping, well we could really make a difference. It’s an easy way to really help STOP STINKING CLIMATE CHANGE !

You know what, we kind of have to do this. So this page is to help you see that there are other ways of eating that are just as delicious or, I think more delicious than meat.

I LOVE eating TOFU. It has protein which is the thing that meat has a lot of. So you can replace meat with TOFU or with QUORN or the meat balls or burgers that are in the shops that are not meat. I love OAT MILK so I replace milk with that. Or SOYA MILK or ALMOND MILK. There are lots more kinds of milk. And different plant based butters and creams and cheeses. If you go to the PLANT-BASED FOOD aisle in the supermarkets, you will find new kinds of things there every week. It’s really exciting how quickly foods are being invented to replace meat and animal-based foods. There is PRECISION FERMENTATION on the way too. I will tell you about that later but for now here are some pictures of delicious food that is all plant-based.

Here are some tasty plant-based balls that taste like meat.

There is a restaurant in Stockholm in Sweden that I really want to go to. It is called CHOU CHOU and here are some pictures of the food there. None of this has meat or dairy om it. I am starting to feel very hungry.

AN IDEA.. If you go to the shops and they don’t have any plant-based foods, you can ask them if they could please get some in. If they don’t understand about why plant-based foods are better for the planet, you can explain to them how and why. Lots of adults actually don’t know this stuff. It’s because they are busy working, so now YOU know, YOU can become one of the messengers who helps open other people’s eyes.