I recently had the pleasure of chatting to Louise, who has been a vegetarian for over 25 years!

I’ve known Louise since my school days. I played football with her brother Ross and I used to run rings around him. OK, so that’s a lie, haha! By quickly doing some number crunching in my head, I worked out she must’ve been around 15 years old when she made the decision to become a vegetarian. My obvious question was why?

Just like my video with Jermain and Quorn, her decision came from watching a documentary. It was based at an abattoir and the sight of seeing animals slaughtered was enough to make Louise cut out meat. Her friend had watched the programme too and they had a bet on with each other to see how long they could both cut out meat. Louise won. She tells me she didn’t eat a load of meat anyway but she has been tempted over the years.

Louise thinks she would have reverted back at some point if it wasn’t for the vast range of vegetarian meals on offer these days. Back in 1993, there were only a handful of things to eat meat-free. Now, you practically have a dedicated aisle in the supermarket. We talked about the previous smell of burnt biscuits and how the quality and taste is so much better.

I started to think how powerful a documentary is and how I must watch at least one to see for myself. I have to admit, seeing the green curtain around a horse at the Grand National recently was an eye opener for me.

Chatting to Louise, I wondered whether her parents or siblings were vegetarian too? They weren’t. I wondered if her husband was and if her choice had been past down to her own kids? Just then, one of her daughters wandered through with a ham sandwich. That answered that question then, haha! She said they can make their own minds up and she certainly wasn’t going to enforce anything on them. Huge thanks to Louise for talking with me and as you can from the picture above, what a beautiful family she has.

As the weather is starting to warm up, I’m thinking about all the BBQs we’re going to have this year. Speaking of which, our family meal this week were Quorn burgers. We even cooked them outside as the weather was so nice over the weekend!

The kids had their own BBQ though, haha!

Both Louise and Jermain said they liked the Quorn burgers and I can see why!

This was definitely one of those easily substituted meals. The kids loved them too!

After the BBQ, we toasted marshmallows on the fire, which is such a great family activity.

We’ve all really enjoyed working with Quorn over the past few months. It’s opened new doors. I think we, as a family, will continue to substitute one meal a week. Producing the meat we eat every year emits more Greenhouse Gases than all the vehicles on earth put together.

Thanks for reading our journey,

*Disclaimer: This was a collaborative post with Quorn. All words and opinions are my own.