Liz Bonnin ‘lost the taste’ for red meat after documentary

Liz Bonnin has said she stopped eating red meat after making a BBC documentary about the impact of meat production on the planet.

The presenter said she did not make a conscious decision to change her diet after making Meat: A Threat To Our Planet?, but just lost her taste for it.

She said: “I was already eating very little amount of meat and I was conscious of buying organic, although organic has its own challenges.

“I think for me what the documentary did was I’ve stopped eating red meat altogether.

“I think, we were discussing it all through the making of the programme, it wasn’t even a stage of going ‘I must’.

“I just naturally have lost the taste for it at the moment.”

Bonnin said a feedlot (a type of animal feeding operation) in the US and a intensive pig farm had a part to play.

She said: “I saw these pigs in the barns and that was it for me.

“I think it’s just propelled an inherent instinct without a big old ‘right, that’s it, I must force myself not to’ – it’s just happened really naturally that I just don’t feel I need to eat red meat.”

The 43-year-old said she could “see myself getting into complete vegetarianism very soon”.

She said: “I was at a climate talk with Chris Packham yesterday, he was talking about how it’s a stage thing for most people the more they learn.

“I think that’s part of the message here – we’re not telling people what to do and to turn vegetarian, but I think inherently we are evolving in our understanding of how our relationship with the planet potentially needs a little bit of a harder look and I think if we can just make gradual changes, it will go a long way.”

Meat: A Threat To Our Planet? airs on BBC One on Monday, November 25.