Climate change begins at home, according to American writer Jonathan Safran Foer. And he places one solution for dealing with the problem directly onto our dinner plate.

The message that we should all be eating less meat will not come as news to those familiar with his 2009 non-fiction work Eating Animals. And in his latest book We Are The Weather, the focus shifts from animal welfare to the environmental benefits of making relatively minor changes to our diet.

So could going without meat for one meal every day really help save the planet, heading off dire predictions of global warming and of sea level rise?