Naomi's planet: why cows measure your progress

07 July 2026

If you open No Meat Today for the first time, you’ll meet Naomi. She’s a cow. She asks you one question — “Did you eat meat today?” — and depending on your answer, you punch one of two planets. Meat-free days attract more cows to the green planet. Log enough meals and the cows fuse into new forms.

People sometimes ask me: why cows? Why planets? Why not a nice clean chart?

Charts tell you what happened. They don’t make you feel it.

I tried the obvious version first. A calendar with green and red days, a weekly count, a trend line. It was accurate and completely inert. Looking at it felt like looking at a bank statement.

The problem with eating less meat is that the payoff is invisible. You skip meat on a Tuesday and nothing happens. No one thanks you. Your body doesn’t send a notification. The climate certainly doesn’t. All the reward is abstract and years away, while the burger is concrete and right there.

So the app’s job isn’t just to record your days. It’s to make an invisible effort visible — and, ideally, worth looking at.

Cows are the unit of progress

Here’s the mechanic underneath the whimsy. Every day’s worth of meatless meals attracts one Daisy cow to your planet. That’s the exchange rate: one day, one cow. They’re called Daisy cows because they come for a DAY of meatless meals.

This does something a chart can’t. A cow arriving is an event. Your planet gets a little more crowded, a little more alive. And when the planet fills up, cows fuse — they combine into higher forms you haven’t seen before, and there are more combos to unlock the further you go. Your history stops being rows in a table and becomes a small universe that exists because of what you did.

Naomi is the friendliest of them. She’s your cowch — yes, I know — and she delivers the daily question with a different silly comment each time. The question never changes; the delivery does. That tiny bit of unpredictability is often the difference between a check-in you do and a check-in you skip.

What the cows deliberately don’t do

Just as important is what I left out. The cows don’t scold you. There’s no broken-streak animation, no red warning when you eat meat. You answer “yes, I ate meat today,” and the universe carries on.

That’s not softness for its own sake. Most people using the app aren’t trying to be perfect — they’re trying to eat less meat, at their own pace, and you can set your target anywhere from omnivorous to vegan. The cows’ tolerance adjusts to your goal. A guilt machine would be miscalibrated for almost everyone using it.

And when you’re standing in front of a menu wondering about the burger, the planet becomes a decision tool. Glance at your week. Mostly green? Enjoy the burger. I call it “asking your cow,” and it works better than any lecture I could have programmed.

Charts inform. Cows accumulate. That’s why cows measure your progress.