The Wednesday

Column: from the perspective of a parent who cooks for three opinions every evening.

Somewhere along the way, the conversation about meat and climate became a matter of faith. You are vegetarian or you are not; you are righteous or you are part of the problem. For anyone cooking for children every evening, that division is above all impractical. Nobody gets converted at a family dinner table. Negotiated, yes.

Hence a more modest proposal than conversion: the Wednesday.

The numbers justify that small gesture generously, because the differences per protein source are bigger than almost anyone thinks. Beef costs 25 to 60 kilos of CO2-equivalent per kilo, chicken 6 to 9, and meat substitutes based on soy, pea or wheat generally stay at 2 to 4, packaging included. Between two products that fill roughly the same gap on the plate sits, at times, a factor of twenty. There is no other territory in a household where a factor like that can be found; the energy-saving bulb manages eight at most.

One fixed swap day therefore does more than it sounds. A family of three replacing one beef meal a week saves 450 to 750 kilos of CO2 per year. Three swap days approach the emissions of thousands of car kilometres. Without anyone becoming vegetarian, without anything being decreed at the table.

Then the price, because that question always comes, and rightly so. Ready-made substitutes sometimes lose to bargain-bin meat and usually win from quality meat. But the cheapest proteins in the entire supermarket are plant-based regardless: lentils, beans, chickpeas. Anyone taking both budget and conscience seriously ends up with a mix, one day a substitute that slips unnoticed into the familiar recipe (which ones succeed best at that is tracked by Risegoods), another day a pot of chili that happens to be the cheapest meal of the week.

The most sustainable effect, meanwhile, never appears on the receipt. Children derive their idea of "normal food" not from information but from repetition. Whoever grows up with bean wraps on Wednesday will later find bean wraps on Wednesday not a statement but simply Wednesday. Eating habits are probably the most heritable piece of climate behaviour a household owns, passed on silently, durable for generations.

Which leaves the question worth pondering, perhaps tonight, somewhere between serving up and the first "I don't like this": if nobody at the table can taste the difference, who exactly is stopping the Wednesday?