Eating (Pretty) Well on a Budget: Meatless Monday

My great-grandfather was a cattle rancher. In our religion we have a health code and part of it says to "eat meat sparingly" which is pretty much left up to interpretation. So to my cattle rancher great-grandpa, eating meat two to three times a day every day was sparingly because he would snack on meat too, but that wouldn't be sparingly. So 3 generations later, that's how I grew up. My husband didn't have a cattle rancher grandpa, but he grew up in a meat and potatoes kind of family, so when we got married, that's how we continued to eat. Fast forward a few years and we're doing research on eating healthier and saving money on food. We found going meatless once or more a week can help a lot in both areas. As an added bonus, it's good for the environment to cut back on meat consumption. Not long after, I heard about a movement that started during the Great Depression, called Meatless Monday. So for 2016, one of our resolutions was to have Meatless Monday every week. We did really well with it and have continued with it ever since. We try and have one or two meatless meals over the weekend as well.

I am now a huge believer in Meatless Monday. It challenges me while meal planning to think of delicious, filling meals that aren't centered on meat. I usually feel really healthy after eating a Meatless Monday meal. I say usually because one of my favourite meatless meals is mac & cheese which doesn't usually qualify as healthy... Focusing more on vegetables and less on meat has really expanded my tastes and helped me branch out to more than just carrots, green beans, broccoli and asparagus. I've now branched out to making butternut squash mac & cheese despite hating squash, loving lentils, and I learned there are more beans besides just black and pinto beans. One goal for this year is to try more vegetarian cooking and branch out to meat substitutes (I'm sure my cattle ranching great-grandpa is rolling over in his grave).

Feeling healthier is a great feeling! But I'm not going to lie, the main reason we stuck with going meatless in the beginning was because of the potential for savings. Aside from Meatless Monday, we also cut meat from one weekend meal, so we went meatless twice a week. If you replace 2 pounds of chicken at $4 with two cans of beans at $1 each, that's half the cost each week. A difference of $2 a week ends up being $100 a year. Of course these numbers are going to be slightly different depending what meal you replace your meat with, but hopefully this at least gives you some idea what your savings could look like.