14% of American adults eat meat for less than half of their meals or not at all. An equal percentage of American adults eat meat with every single meal. The research classes them as "avid" and they offer a carnivorous equilibrium to the semi- and fully- vegetarian folk at the other end of the lever.

As often as I wax lyrically about the vice that is animal flesh, fewer than half of my meals contain it. Maybe "militant omnivore" would be a better description. I eat meat occasionally but I really do enjoy it. In a statistical sense, I get placed closer to the vegetarians, but philosophically, I'm at the other end of the table gnawing on something with marrow in it.

I probably spend exactly the same proportion of my budget on meat that I did in the past, but now my meat consumption tends to be more indulgent. I'm buying better cuts of meat; aged grass-fed steaks, more crab, fish so fresh that rigor mortis has barely set in, but in much lower quantities.

In the past, I probably could have afforded to eat this way but it is much easier to get stuck into the cycle of basing your meals around the cheapest animal protein that you can find. Buying meat at an Australian supermarket is optimised for this behaviour: price is always touted as the drawcard with other concerns coming secondary. It is easy to bulk load.

There is research aplenty to support the sustainability of eating no meat, and some to suggest that a little omnivorousness might use less land than a high fat vegetarian diet. From Science Daily:

A person following a low-fat vegetarian diet, for example, will need less than half (0.44) an acre per person per year to produce their food," said Christian Peters, a Cornell postdoctoral associate in crop and soil sciences and lead author of the research. "A high-fat diet with a lot of meat, on the other hand, needs 2.11 acres."

"Surprisingly, however, a vegetarian diet is not necessarily the most efficient in terms of land use," said Peters.

The key word is "necessarily". Peters' argument, based on land in New York state, is that lower quality cropland is better suited for growing ruminants than it is for growing a food crop; and that leaving land fallow is required to rotate crops rather than looking at ways to improve the soil over time and concentrate on flora rather than fauna.