Hi! My name is Miranda. Let me introduce myself, I am a mother of two energetic school age kids and like most people during the COVID-19 global pandemic, I have been deep-diving into Netflix. During one of my recent Netflix explorations, I stumbled upon the documentaries The Game Changers, Forks Over Knives and Cowspiracy. After watching the documentaries, the kids and I sat down and had a very interesting conversation about our health and the environment.

Over the last 13 years, my diet had changed significantly as I found myself eating more and more red meat. So what led to this change? Meeting my partner! Before my partner, I was on a typical Asian Australian diet of chicken, pork and fish with vegetables and rice or noodles. My partner on the other hand, grew up eating the typical Anglo Australian diet of meat and three vegetables with a huge focus on red meat.

Whilst pregnant with my first child, I was diagnosed with gestational diabetes. This was a serious wakeup call and led to some tweaks to our diet. We made the conscious decision to eat more organic meat and produce and swap our breads and rice to a low GI option. On the recommendation of my doctor, I kept a food diary for the duration of my pregnancy and increased my level of exercise. Through these small but permanent adjustments, there were no complications to my first pregnancy or my subsequent pregnancy.

To date, we still eat organic meat and produce. We try to eat eat one meat free meal a week. There is the occasional splurge and when we eat out or get take away, we cannot control whether the food is organic. I try not to beat myself up, at the end of the week, I need a break from cooking.

The Netflix documentaries presented a number of interesting facts and made us question the sustainability of our current diet. By eating meat daily, are we compromising our wellbeing and what kind of world are we leaving to the future generations. Based on our family medical history, our kids are susceptible to developing diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and/or heart disease.

So, we as a family have decided to flip around our family diet. Instead of one meat free meal a week, we are determined to move to only one meat meal a week. At the moment, we are in the transitioning stage, stocking up on legumes, alternate grains and meat free alternatives (jackfruit, tofu and tempeh). I’ve also started to collect recipes through Pinterest and other cookbooks and will test them out on the family.

Join me as we embark on our journey to a more sustainable plant-based lifestyle.