WINE CHATS: Is it OK to eat meat in every meal? Or should you eat vegetarian meals too?

Do you make vegetarian meals on the regular or does your meal feel incomplete without meat?

This week here on The Nightly, we’re chatting about dinner time, because we recently discovered that Lyndsey will often do vegetarian-based dinners whereas Billi couldn’t dream of doing such a thing. As we bust open a couple of cans of BOX the Alcoholic Juice by the very cool G Flip, we settle in and learn things about each other we never knew…

To meat or not to meat

Billi: Tell me about how you just don’t eat meat every single day.

Lyndsey: No, ew.

Billi: I’m one of those people, it saddens me to say, who eats meat in probably every one of my meals.

Lyndsey: But why does that sadden you?

Billi: Apparently, it’s not a good thing. Because people judge. I don’t know. Are you going to judge me? Go on.

Lyndsey: No, I’m not going to judge you. You do you. If you want to eat meat in every meal, go nuts. For me, I definitely don’t need meat in every meal.

Billi: Then what do you eat?

Lyndsey: Vegetables. Extra vegetables. I feel it’s a really weird feeling that I can only describe as kind of, I want to say claustrophobic, but that doesn’t make sense. I just feel like my system’s like, no, we don’t need meat today.

Billi: Okay. So your system asks for it.

Lyndsey: I feel better and lighter when I don’t eat meat all the time. Does that make sense to some people? I hope so.

Billi: It does. I don’t really have that. I feel almost the opposite where I’m semi offended when a meal comes without some sort of meat.

It’s really weird. Even if I were to make a pizza, it’s not a big deal to just not put ham on a pizza. But for some reason to me, it’s just wrong. There’s just something wrong with my meal if there isn’t some sort of meat inside it.

Lyndsey: Right. I don’t know, I’m not a vegetarian or animal activist or whatever. But there was a time when we went away just recently, my family, and I were driving home and there was a big cattle truck in front of us and their heads were sticking out of the grating of the truck.

And the kids were even saying “Oh, mum, look at the cows!” and I was like, oh cute and then I realized they’re on that type of truck and I felt really sad and then the kids were asking why there are so many trucks. So we realized what they were, where they were off to. And I told the kids.

Billi: I think you need to be honest with them about where meat comes from.

Lyndsey: Totally. They know that beef is cows, and pork is a pig, but I think when they saw it, they were all mortified. So I think it was a good lesson to know they actually go and kill the cows.

Is that stopping me from having a burger? No. But I feel like I need less meat In my life.

Billi: I don’t feel that way, but I totally get that point as well. I think it’s horrible what we do for food. I’m very honest with my kids about that. We talk about it all the time, especially when you’re eating like a chicken leg, it’s kind of easy to be like, this is actually a leg of a living being.

So we’ve definitely been very open with them about that sort of stuff. I used to even live back in Serbia somewhere, right next to a place where they would kill pigs.

You would just hear the squealing, and squealing, and squealing, and squealing. And then eventually there would be no squealing left. But that still didn’t put me off eating bacon, which is, you know, interesting. Maybe because I come back from such a huge meat-eating background in general.

You don’t eat meat? No problem, we’ll make lamb!

Billi: We laugh at vegetarians in my culture. My mum has been a vegetarian for years and I still don’t quite believe it.

Lyndsey: I didn’t know Jasna was a vegetarian.

Billi: My mum has been a vegetarian for probably a good 10 years.

Lyndsey: Why did she become a vegetarian? To save the animals, I know that sounds like a stupid question, or does she just not like meat?

Billi: I think it’s a bit of both of those things.

Lyndsey: She has no clue. It could be because she’s allergic to animals.

Billi: I have no idea. She’s definitely not allergic to animals. But I just laugh it off because I think it’s hilarious that she’s a vegetarian. It’s like my Big Fat Greek Wedding when Ian comes to the Greek feast and then they’re like, okay, what do you want to have? So they say, oh no, he’s a vegetarian. And the Greeks are like, okay, we’ll make you lamb! That’s the treatment my mum got when she went back to see the family (in Bosnia).

Lyndsey: Your poor mother.

Billi: But I did just very briefly look into if it’s bad to eat so much meat. Like, is it a problem with morality or is there a problem with eating so much meat?

So the Cancer Council advises that meat eaters should limit red meat to three or four times a week.

Now I will say that I don’t eat that much red meat. We eat chicken and we eat a lot of fish because Henry likes to go fishing.

Red meat, I’ll probably have once a week, once a fortnight even. So it’s not that bad but still, chickens are living things too.

Lyndsey: It’s still a meat.

Billi: And then also it says that eating too much-processed meat and red meat probably increases your risk of bowel cancer.

Lyndsey: Are you only just learning this? Look, everything nowadays could possibly give you cancer depending on what report you’re reading.

Billi: And so do you have vegetarian dinners?

Lyndsey: Oh, absolutely. My normal go-to veggie meal, which is always super easy and safe, is just pasta with veggies in the sauce. Heaps of veggies. Not big hunks of veggies, because obviously I still have small children. But heaps of veggies.

And I feel like that just kind of resets me. In the sense of, I’ve just had a crap ton of veggies. It’s an easy meal. I’m not making these weird fancy vegetarian meals. Like tofu and all that. I mean, I love tofu. None of my family members would eat tofu. But I love tofu.

Billi: Tofu is like little pillows of nothing. It’s literally little silky pillows of nothing. And, I mean, the only thing missing from your meal is just some minced meat.

Meat me here

Whilst we can all agree with Lyndsey that adding more veggies to our diet is the healthy thing to do, Billi is happy to consider potatoes and bread as her main salad. Her 40’s and 50’s are going to be a LOT of fun!

Meat us again (see what we did there) next week for another brand new episode of Wine Chats, same time, same place, here on The Nightly!