Save some money, save the planet and keep your family healthy all at the same time with Meatless Mondays. Oprah recently asked Michael Pollan, whole foods advocate and author of “In Defense of Food” and “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” about the best way to reduce ones carbon footprint. The answer? Eat less meat. His family has one meat-free day per week.
This is how Meatless Mondays was born. Meatless Mondays is a non-profit initiative of the Monday Campaigns and the Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health. The goal? To reduce meat consumption by fifteen percent in order to improve both our health and the health of the planet.
Americans are only five percent of the world’s population but we eat fifteen percent of the world’s meat. The various industries that produce that meat generate one-fifth of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.
Not only will having meatless Monday’s slim down your carbon footprint, starting the week on a healthy note will help raise energy levels and put you back on the right track nutritionally after the weekend’s indulgences. Less meat means less saturated fat, which lowers your risk of heart disease and keeps cholesterol low. Less fat also means fewer calories, and forces you to add more vegetable variety to your diet thus increasing the amount of nutrients you get for the day. Plus, in the grand scheme of things, less meat demand means less meat production, which will save water and lower our dependency on the fossil fuels that factory farming demands.
Meatless Mondays also means no fish on Monday – fish also have a mega carbon footprint. Stick with beans, nuts, tofu and high-protein veggies and grains.
