So far, so good.

We're two weeks in, we're still married and we don't hate any of our meat eating friends so we must be doing something right! To be fair though, that's probably because we've been working through the meat in the freezer so not a huge amount has changed yet.

Our first properly committed night, we were invited out to dinner at a friend's house. We don't expect anyone else to cater to us so we were happy to eat whatever they provided. Happily, though, the nachos we ate that night were made with homelike beef supplied by a family member and made from happy, grass fed cows, privately reared, who had never seen the inside of a cattle farm.

Sustainable meat, straight from the source - exactly what we want to eat more of.

The food we have in our freezer is admittedly not sustainable, grass fed, or organic/free range. But I think throwing away food, any food, would be counter productive to what we're trying to achieve so we have already agreed to eat it in small doses until it's gone. After that we will only buy and eat home kill meat and freshly caught fish.

As for eating out, we've been pretty good on that front. I watched Food Inc with a friend of mine, which pretty much guaranteed I won't be having McDonalds (or any other fast food of that variety) any time in the near future. Our other normal pitfall is Mexican food, and I must admit to having a chicken taco in Auckland last week. However, that was the last of the cheating and since then I've been checking out vegetarian options in different places. Spinach and Feta rolls have become a new favourite, and Stu had discovered beetroot burgers and brown rice energy rolls, both of which he loves.

Being able to find a substitute for food that we like (like burgers and sausage rolls) and still be able to maintain the sustainable lifestyle we've chosen is awesome and it's been easier than I imagined it would be. I did hear rumours that going vegetarian would guarantee weight loss, but I guess if you're substituting meat in your diet with chocolate that probably won't happen too quickly...!

Semi-Vegetarianism..

We've decided to go vegetarian.

Well, semi-vegetarian. Can you be semi-vegetarian? As someone who was staunchly vegetarian for a huge chunk of my youth, I know how infuriating that phrase can be to someone who strictly follows the 'vegetarian rules' and doesn't let a morsel of anything living pass their lips.

However, this isn't about rules. This isn't about a label, this is about a lifestyle. Realistically, we can't keep consuming meat in the way we do ('we' being the global 'we', not the Husband and I personally). We're killing the planet and we're doing it pretty quickly.

Before you roll your eyes and lump me in with the hippies and the crazies, let me assure you that this isn't going to be another earth-mother-save-the-planet type blog with advice on how to sew clothes from hemp and grow your own everything. This is just a picture of a small slice of our journey that we want to document so we can see exactly how much we screw it up while trying our best not to.

I rarely think about what my diet is doing to the planet - that is some big scale thinking. I'm usually much further down the intellectual scale, thinking about what I'm putting in my mouth for dinner and when dinner is over, I'm thinking about what nice thing I can have and exactly how much I can have so I'm just straddling the fine line between satisfying my craving and dipping into some unhealthy shame and guilt before bed.

Who has time to wonder if the chicken I just ate had a good life?

So let's take it down a notch. Forget the big picture (not forever though, that shit is going to catch up to us eventually) and I'll try to focus on just me. Dial it into a selfish, macro close up of my life and my life only.

I don't want heart disease, especially since I already have heart issues. I don't want to be overweight and struggle to lose even a few pounds. I don't want my kids to grow up pumped full of hormones and antibiotics because what happens when the antibiotics stop working and they get sick? I'm not trying to demonise meat or meat-eaters - it isn't the only cause of these things, and you can eat meat in a healthy and sustainable way, but the reality is, most of us don't.

I buy free range eggs, but not free range chicken. I don't think about what else is included in the sausages when they say they are only 43% pork. We don't eat much beef, but when we do, it's not free range, it's not sustainable and it's not cheap.

So this is an experiment. An experiment into a semi-vegetarian, mostly-meat free, sustainable diet that will hopefully be good for us, good for our space and good for our kids (when we eventually have some).

I don't know how this will go and I don't know how we'll do. We'll try to grow some veggies to cut down costs but I don't exactly have a green thumb - who knows, maybe I'll luck out and manage to grow more than just spring onions this year. We'll finish the meat we have in the freezer (I'm not into wasting food!) and then we'll only eat the fish that Husband catches spearfishing. We might invest in some homelike beef for the freezer, though probably not, as like I said, we don't eat a huge amount of beef.

This will be hard, and at times I'm sure we'll want to 'cheat' and have a Big Mac, but we're really going to try.

It's going to be an interesting journey, so wish us luck!