Transition to a plant based diet

by Ella Humphrey

This Community Blog written by Ella Humphrey, tells her journey towards a plant-based diet. We are delighted to hear from you Ella, thank you!

I made a decision to stop eating meat and adopt a predominantly plant-based diet after listening to a talk on veganism at the Habit Alignment Key (HAK) retreat in Bendigo, Australia, in 2023. For most of my life, I had eaten meat without thinking. After that talk, I started to question why I ate meat when I had the option not to. It was a choice I had made without much thought at all. The people I lived with ate meat; most restaurants predominantly served meat dishes, and it seemed the tastiest option. I started to question why I had it in so many of my meals and whether I needed to eat it to live a healthy life. Why was it so easy to eat meat without much thought about where it came from?

When I first moved to where I live now, I started taking my dog for a walk around the block. On one walk I met John, who owned two very large female pigs who slept in a ramshackle wooden hut perched on the bank of a stream covered with foliage. I had eaten pork all my life but had never encountered pigs close up. Like many people, I grew up in a city, and our family bought food at the supermarket. We were very removed from the source of our food. I have never seen an animal being slaughtered to provide food for our nightly meal. Over time, I got to know the pigs. I noticed how they would cuddle up to each other for comfort when having a nap. They seemed to consult each other and make decisions together about their next move. I started to bring them snacks and quickly worked out they liked apples and bananas but weren’t so keen on carrots.

John bred pigs for sale. He had an adolescent male pig who kept trying to escape. On his last and final escape attempt, he got through the fence and ran off down the nearby train line. It took the police the best part of a day to catch him. Because it was a suburban area, the police told John he had to surrender his pig to the local animal rescue organisation.

A while later I met John again. He told me he’d been watching the nightly news, and all of a sudden there was his pig on the television; he’d know his pig anywhere. The news channel had done a story on the animal rescue organisation. His pig was now living with a woman who had adopted him and clearly adored him. The look of happiness and relief on John’s face. His pig had found a good home, and he was loved! It was really joyful news for him. It really made me think that human beings have this enormous capacity to love and care for other living beings.

When I came back from the HAK, I met a new work colleague from India. We talked about what we were having for lunch and realised we had both only recently become full-time vegetarians. He said it wasn’t a huge shift for him because in India his family cooked only vegetarian food at home. They only ate meat when they went out for a meal. He said he was no longer comfortable that an animal should lose its life just so he could enjoy a good taste.

A tofu, basil, and buckwheat salad shared on our website under the Food for Thought blog.

In 2007, His Holiness the Dalai Lama gave a talk at the Crocoseum at Australia Zoo in Queensland. He said taking care of animals is essential to developing more happiness in human beings. I recall him saying that if we can’t stop eating meat, at least should try to reduce the amount you eat.

Recently, David Attenborough said in the Netflix documentary, A Life on Our Planet, that we must re-wild the world: “When it comes to the land, we must radically reduce the area we use to farm so that we can make space for returning wilderness. And the quickest and most effective way to do that, is for us to change our diet…The planet can’t support billions of large meat-eaters. There just isn’t the space. If we all had a largely plant based diet, we would need only half the land we use at the moment”.

The world’s population is now close to 8 billion people. The number of people in the world has tripled in 70 years. The UN has estimated that the population will grow to 11.2 billion by 2100.

To feed the world’s population, almost half the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture, around 5 times the size of the United States, a total area of 48 million km2. The majority of agricultural land, around 80%, is used for pasture and crops for livestock and dairy production. Livestock requires land to be fed, be it land for the animal to graze on or to produce crops such as cereals for feed. Clearing land for agriculture is a driving force of deforestation and biodiversity loss. In my home state of Queensland in Australia, large swathes of land have been cleared for beef production, impacting millions of native animals each year.

More than 3/4 of agricultural land is used by livestock, either for meat or dairy.

A report published in Science in 2018 revealed that while meat and dairy provided just 18% of calories and 37% of protein, 83% of farmland was used, producing up to 58% of agriculture’s greenhouse gases. Collectively shifting to a largely plant-based diet would dramatically reduce the amount of land used for agriculture.

As David Attenborough said, our planet can’t support billions of large meat-eaters. As a collective, we can shift our diet to plant-based alternatives and scale back the amount of land used and cleared for meat and dairy livestock. The need to regenerate and rewild degraded land, forests, and habitats has never been more urgent.

I thought it would be difficult to shift to plant-based meals, but it wasn’t. I now marvel at the versatility of the chickpea, the warming effect of a good lentil soup, and the way the Middle Eastern spices enhance the taste of a range of roasted vegetables. There are so many tasty vegan meals that don’t take too long to make. A plant-based diet has many benefits: for the preservation of biodiversity, for living beings, and for personal health. We can all make an effort, whether it be big or small: we can make the effort for other beings, for the planet, and for future generations.