In 2026, Meghan and I are trying something different with our diet. Nothing dramatic, nothing strict, just a couple of small changes to how we approach the weekday.
On most Mondays now, there’s a sheet pan of roasted sweet potatoes in the oven, a pot of quinoa on the stove, and tofu crisping up in the cast iron. We try to prep through Thursday so that we can spend after work hours in the park. We keep some variety in our lives with different sauces and vegetable inclusions. And lunch looks more like yogurt, fruit, and granola than a turkey sandwich. At some point, we decided that meat doesn’t have to be the default anymore.
I wouldn’t say we “went vegetarian.” We still eat meat — just not most days. And as it turns out, that small shift adds up to something much bigger than expected. We didn’t start this as a big climate pledge or diet experiment. We just started reading more about the environment.
We were both moved by David Attenborough’s A Life on Our Planet, which lays out in clear (and heartbreaking) terms what we’ve traded away in the last century: forests, species, and balance. It becomes increasingly undeniable through the read what kind of impact our insatiable human needs have had on our planet. I was reminded of Jonathan Safran Foer’s We Are the Weather which makes a sharper point: that some of the most meaningful climate decisions we make happen three times a day, at the table. Food, it turns out, is not a side issue. It’s one of the most direct ways our daily lives impact the environment.
The global discourse on climate change often focuses on emissions from cars, flights, power plants, and the big corporate behemoths. We debate endlessly about carbon sinks and whether offsets really matter. We try to make ourselves feel better about our personal impact by recycling and using paper straws. But zoom out just a bit, and a more important constraint comes into view: land use.
The expansion of pasture and feed crops is the leading cause of deforestation worldwide.
Agriculture is the primary human use of land and the largest global source of human-caused methane emissions — a greenhouse gas far more potent in the short term than carbon dioxide. The expansion of pasture and feed crops is the leading cause of deforestation worldwide. And livestock farming doesn’t just produce emissions. It takes up an extraordinary amount of space — not only for the animals themselves, but for the crops grown to feed them. At current levels of meat consumption, meeting demand often means clearing forests to make room. Forests aren’t cleared because people crave soybeans; they’re cleared because those soybeans are fed to animals first.
So we started paying attention to what was actually changing on our plates.
Before, a typical week was filled with meat. We like to bike and ski and pretend to go to the gym regularly, so we try to fit our protein into every meal. Dinners were built around ground beef or chicken, usually paired with rice and roasted vegetables. Lunches often meant turkey and cheese sandwiches from the deli counter. Nothing was excessive or unusual. It felt normal.
Now, four or five days a week, we try to stay vegetarian. Baked tofu instead of meat. Simpler and lighter lunches of yogurt, fruit, and fresh juices. Homemade pizzas topped with vegetables from the farmers’ market. Small changes that are making us feel lighter and forcing us to experiment with new flavors. But what actually surprised me was how quickly the math stacked up.
Replanting helps, but it doesn’t replace what’s lost.
From a land-use perspective alone, the difference between beef and plant-based proteins is enormous. Producing beef requires roughly ten times more land per unit of protein than foods like tofu or legumes. That means that every time we swap a beef-based meal for a plant-based one, we’re effectively giving land back.
Over the course of a year, replacing about four beef-based meals a week adds up to roughly 200–300 square meters of land spared. Depending on how you visualize forests, that’s on the order of 80 to 120 mature trees’ worth of space. Roughly speaking: by eating mostly vegetarian, our household is saving about 100 trees a year. We haven’t planted anything, we’ve just stopped demanding so much land use for our weekly meals. And you know we’ll do just about anything for the trees.
We often talk about trees and lumber as a renewable resource, but that framing misses something important. A mature forest isn’t interchangeable with a newly planted one. Older trees store far more carbon, regulate water more effectively, and support layers of life — from fungi and lichens to birds and mammals — that can take decades or centuries to return once land is cleared. Replanting helps, but it doesn’t replace what’s lost. Saving existing trees matters because mature forests do the work that young forests simply can’t within our lifetime.
The water story from our diet change is just as striking. Producing a pound of beef requires roughly 1,800 gallons of water when you account for feed, the animal, and processing. Plant-based proteins like tofu use more like 300 gallons per pound. Over a year, this shift saves on the order of 25,000 to 30,000 gallons of water — roughly what one person uses at home in an entire year.
Then there’s carbon. Beef is one of the most carbon-intensive foods we eat. Switching several meals a week from beef to tofu reduces our household emissions by roughly 1.5 to 2 metric tons of CO₂ each year. That’s the rough equivalent of 3,000-4,000 miles of driving. So now we can feel a little less guilty about our next road trip.
There’s no big pledge here. We’re not aiming for perfection, and we’re not interested in convincing anyone else to adopt a specific label. This is just about noticing where small, repeatable choices have outsized effects.
If you’re curious, you don’t have to change everything. One vegetarian dinner a week makes a difference. Or one meat-free lunch. Or just pause next time you’re at the grocery store and look at what’s being asked of the land for what you’re about to buy.
Food is one of the few climate choices we get to make daily. And sometimes, the most meaningful environmental work happens in the quiet of our homes.
Save a tree, eat the tofu.
