Quit Meat, reduce your impact by shifting to a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle
You want to eat less Meat & Dairy? Maybe become Vegan? Then Quit Meat is your Best Friend! Follow day by day your animal product consumption, see how all the little progress you make into a vegan life benefit to the environment
Source: Android description / Image: Pixabay
Useful information
Download: Android 4.1 (26MB) / iOS 8.0 (32.3MB)
Price: free
Language: English / French / German
Runs offline: partially (connection needed to get more information about the news shown)
Last update: Android 29/08/2018 (v. 1.0.7) – iOS 30/08/2018 (v. 1.0.4)
Website of the developer: Annapurnapp Technologies
Description
Quit Meat is an app designed primarily for people who want to reduce their environmental impact by decreasing their consumption of animal products and dairy. Its main mission is, therefore, to support the transition to a vegan, vegetarian or flexitarian diet, offering as indicators the water or emissions saved. It also provides information on the days you have not eaten meat or dairy products and eggs and the animals you have saved.
Information provided by the app
The app does not require a user account, storing data on the device itself. Once the initial tutorial is displayed (see animated GIF), the screen from which you can enter your consumptions is shown. The application has a menu at the bottom with the following options:
- Did you know? (symbol of the book), which reveals news related to the animal world or health. They include an external link for further information.
- Recipes and substitutes (chef’s hat symbol), where you can find vegan recipes and recommendations on what foods you can use as substitutes for meat, dairy or eggs.
- Environmental benefits (symbol of the award), a section from which you can check the number of animals you have saved, the cubic metres of water saved, the greenhouse gases not emitted and the days you have not eaten meat. This last count starts from the day you open the app for the first time. But you can modify it by clicking on the large percentage and selecting “Edit starting date”.
- Home or Profile (symbol of the rabbit), section that gives you an overview of your progress and allows you to introduce your consumption of meat, eggs and dairy products.
Equivalence tables
Calculations related to the carbon footprint (greenhouse gases not emitted), the water footprint (water spared) and the animals saved are obtained by applying the following reference values:
These data have been compiled by the Annapurnapp Technologies team from numerous trusted sources.
Image gallery
The screenshots correspond to the Android version of the application.
- CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO SEE THE GIF
Images: screenhots 24/10/2018. © Annapurnapp Technologies
Video
The video is recorded using the Android version of the application (4 min 25 sec).
More information
Avoiding meat and dairy is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth (The Guardian, 31/05/2018)
Clarys, P., Deliens, T., Huybrechts, I., Deriemaeker, P., Vanaelst, B., & De Keyzer, W. et al. (2014). Comparison of Nutritional Quality of the Vegan, Vegetarian, Semi-Vegetarian, Pesco-Vegetarian and Omnivorous Diet. Nutrients 2014, 6, 1318-1332. Available at https://doi.org/10.3390/nu6031318.
Links to the information sources used to create the reference tables
- Average sea product consumption per country (SeaWeb Europe, July 2018)
- Average meat consumption in France (CIV – Viande, Sciences et Société, May 2017)
- Average meat consumption in France/animal (Ministère de l’Agriculture et de l’Alimentation, May 2016)
- Average sea product consumption in France (FranceAgriMer, July 2016)
- Meat consumption per country (OECD-FAO Agricultural Outlook, 2017)
- Fish consumption/type of fish in EU (European Commission, 2016)
- Dairy consumption in EU and USA (FAO, January 2018)
- Milk necessary/dairy product (Coop de France, March 2013)
- Resources/kg meat (Le Monde, October 2015)
- Resources/kg meat (National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine, April 2012)
- GHG/animal product (Skeptical Science, November 2015)
- Water/animal product (The Guardian, January 2013)
- eCO2 calculator (US EPA, September 2017)
Rating
Analysis
Few issues spark a debate as heated as the impact of meat consumption on the planet. Without undertaking any evaluation on the health benefits or harms of adopting one type of diet or another, it seems proven that the current system of food production, in which livestock has an important weight, generates a strong environmental impact. In fact, a recent study published in Nature suggests that the increase in global population, coupled with the absence of technological transformations and mitigation measures, could make this impact increase by 2050 by 50-90%. The solution, in the opinion of the authors of the study, would be the combination of various measures, among which the adoption of a flexitarian diet stands out. This change in eating habits would mean, as The Guardian published, consuming «75% less beef, 90% less pork and half the number of eggs, while tripling consumption of beans and pulses and quadrupling nuts and seeds». In other words, to reduce the environmental impact of your diet, you don’t have to give up meat and dairy products completely if you don’t want to, but you would have to reduce their intake greatly.
Obviously, you can choose to adopt a strict vegan or vegetarian diet. But if you choose a more flexible type of diet, applications such as Quit Meat can be very helpful, as they allow you to see what is your impact on the planet in relation to food. So, for example, if you decide to eat poultry occasionally, your impact will be smaller than if you are a daily beef consumer. The use of indicators related to environmental impact is possibly one of the most outstanding aspects of the app, showing them in a simple way. Also interesting are the news sections and recipes for vegan food, although this last section does not (yet) have much to choose from. As for possible improvements, it would be necessary to include the equivalence tables in the app, so that users can see how the data are calculated. Some small adjustments are also necessary. For example, when consumption of animal products skyrockets, showing negative values. In this case it would be convenient to change the statement “You saved the equivalent of -XX showers in water” to a lighter one, even with a striking color that attracts attention.