@TheCobbler,
My wife and I are vegetarians and have been for decades. My wife tried Veganism for some years but found it to be wholly impractical if you have a life outside of one's own home.
We are vegetarian because we would never kill an animal to eat ourselves, so we do not buy into that hypocrisy. We eat a product called Quorn, we eat Mock Duck and occasionally Tofu ... Meat replicating products do not offend us, killing sentient beings to eat ... that most certainly does.
That is our only motivation as such. Myself I am insulin dependent Type 2, so I avoid eating sugar and so forth. My wife has migraines and so avoids some foods such as chocolate.
What is interesting is that my wife is a PhD Dr and presents at conferences. Or used to before the pandemic, now it is all via
Zoom or the somewhat less useful
MS Teams of course. However previously at those academic only conferences, around 80% of the participants were identified as being either vegetarian or vegan.
There is seemingly a misconstrued viewpoint in the general public that academics are somehow stupid (???), have no common sense (sense is definitely not common), that they wear fuddy duddy clothing, hug trees and have no clue what 'life is' ... No, academics definitely like big houses, superb holidays, expensive cars, clothes, watches and generally have a fantastic time as they are very well paid indeed. My wife is a Dr Psychology & Criminology, but this afternoon stripped down and repaired this PC entirely on her own ... She can also fit shelves, fix washing machines and do so many other things along with her career.
But it appears on the subject of dietary intake, anecdotally at least, that the vast majority of European academics do not eat meat.