The EAT Lancet report Commission recently released a report providing guidelines for how much meat to eat per day. The goal of this report is to reach a global consensus on what constitutes a sustainable diet. The results are quite punishing: according to the report, individuals should eat just 14g of beef, 14g of pork and 58g of chicken per average day.
That’s not much. On a weekly basis, that works out to just under 100g of beef, 100g of pork and 406g of chicken per person per week.
Is it possible to still be a meat eater with a majority of meat meals and achieve these targets? Perhaps. Below I have a go at preparing a meal plan to fit such guidelines.
I’ve skipped breakfast on the assumption it can easily be done as muesli or cereal or pancakes, all of which are non-meat. Lunch is listed first, dinner after.
Saturday
Blueberry pancakes. (Make enough for two batches and save for tomorrow.)
1.2 kg roast chicken (to feed three people)Celery, carrot, onion, rosemary, lemon, salt and pepper, and potatoes for lots of handcut chips and peas to serve.Eat about 200g per person and keep half of the meat for leftovers during the week.
Boil the bones down for stock after the meal.
Put a whole pumpkin to roast in the oven at the same time you are roasting the chicken, in order to use for meals later in the week.
Sunday
Blueberry pancakes.
300g pork mince (for meatballs and wontons – for three people)
Make meatball recipe using egg, carrot, onion, breadcrumbs, spring onions, salt and pepper, cumin and coriander to make the meat go much further – this would create about 18 meatballs.
Using some of the broth from last night, make wonton noodle soup using noodles, chilli sauce, fish sauce, spring onion, ginger, mushroom, bok choi, and two meatballs as wontons (with wonton wrappers) per serve.
Monday
Package up about 200g of chicken per person for use in sandwiches and salads during the week, along with as many hand cut chips as you can take. Use about 50g of chicken per serve in your lunch, buy bread at the local baker.
Use the leftover roasted pumpkin to make Pasta Rotolo. Need 1 jar of passata, spinach, garlic cloves and feta or ricotta cheese, sage leaves, along with pasta sheets for the rotolo. This will go for three serves across two nights
Tuesday
Chicken salad/sandwich and chips as above.
Pasta with meatballs. Make a tagliatelle with tomato sauce – garlic cloves, oregano, red wine vinegar, two tins tomatoes and parmesan. Cook and add in two meatballs per serve.
Wednesday
Chicken salad/sandwich and chips as above.
Pasta Rotolo as above.
Thursday
Chicken salad/sandwich and chips as above.
Use the leftover chicken broth to make any of a number of soups or dishes, such as leek and potato soup, or French onion soup.
Alternatively, make another round of wonton noodle soup and use up your remaining 6 meatballs as wontons for three serves.
Friday
By now you should have run out of leftovers. Buy lunch, non-meat based, up to $10. Or perhaps use some leftover tagliatelle.
Steak night. Have 100g top quality steak per person. Add in lots of chips or mashed potato and spinach or greens to make it a rounded meal.
There you have it. Sticking within EAT Lancet guidelines, it is still possible to have 9 out of 14 lunch and dinner meals as meat meals per week.
Basically the above can be done with relative ease, but does require a bit of a switch from some meat to some carbs, especially potatoes. Effectively it requires the dilution of meat in the diet through creative use of meatballs and stock – what I call meat derivatives. Using these two features greatly extends the way in which a fairly small amount of meat can stretch across a week of meals.
I am going to try this. But I’m not going to rush into it. Across the next few months, I’ll try variations of the above diet one week out of four to ease in to the new model.