Meatless Mondays

My favorite radio talk show host is Richard Greene. He is an intelligent, kind and gentle soul who also happens to be vegetarian. One of his main reasons for going veg was environmental. I'm not convinced that very many people become vegetarian or better yet, vegan, for that reason...because they don't know the horrific impact of meat-eating on the environment.

Richard knows that it may be very difficult for some people to become vegetarian or vegan, but he also knows that if people even gave up one day of meat eating per week it would make a significant impact on greenhouse gases. So what he has proposed on his show, is that listeners take a "pledge" to go meatless on Mondays, hence the term "Meatless Mondays". Even Richard's most carnivorous male assistants on the show give up meat on Mondays, and by the way, that also includes fish...and anything that has a face and a butt. Every Monday night, Richard asks his boys what they ate that day, and it's pretty amazing what they come up with, considering the lack of veggie knowledge out there. As much as they love meat, they admit how much lighter and better they feel at the end of a Monday.

I think Meatless Mondays are something everyone in the world could live with, and I'd like to see how many people I could get to commit to that. How much could it hurt? So if you are supposed to go to your favorite restaurant for some big meat-centered meal on a Monday, switch the date to another. How hard could that be? And not much of a sacrifice at all considering the positive impact on the future of the planet. Below I'm listing some of the effects of meat-eating on the environment:

--It takes 12-16 pounds of grain to yield one pound of meat. This is revealed in Diet for a New America, by John Robbins, founder of Earth Save and son of Baskin-Robbins. He also mentions it in his sequel to that book, May All Be Fed. Using that grain could yield 12-16 times as much food as it does now.

--For that same pound of beef, it takes up to 2500 gallons of water. This one speaks for itself; water is a precious commodity and we need it for so many other things.

--The gas and waste produced by cattle is more harmful to the environment than all the fumes from the fuel of automobiles and public transportation.

The above information can be found at www.earthsave.org and http://www.foodrevolution.org/ as well as countless other environmental websites.

Have a peaceful Sunday and a meatless Monday!

Bev