Meatless Monday: It’s a flexible, commonsense approach to diet

By Thomas H. Dennison

The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently suggested that its employees participate in Meatless Monday, a positive development met by a blizzard of negativity.

“This move by USDA should be condemned by anyone who believes agriculture is fundamental to sustaining life on this planet,” commented the head of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association.

Meatless Monday is not anti-agriculture. Farmers raise a huge variety of crops and commodities. Meatless Monday simply suggests that people consume a bit more plant-based food and a bit less meat, particularly red and processed meat. Such a change would benefit most Americans, and most agricultural producers.

Meatless Monday encourages people to skip meat once a week, and it works with restaurants and institutional food suppliers to ensure that a vegetarian option is offered on Mondays. Meat stays on the menu as well. One of the campaign’s central tenets is that people should have a choice of eating meat or not.

The National Monday team itself is tiny: a handful of dedicated staff working for a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization. The staff offers assistance to people and groups looking to start Monday efforts of their own, all of which become their own unique enterprises tailored to the needs, wants and sensibilities of the organizers and their communities. The program is one of many started by the Monday Campaigns aimed at reducing chronic, preventable disease by focusing on smoking (Quit & Stay Quit Monday), nutrition (Kids Cook Monday), exercise (Move it Monday) and stress (Caregivers’ Monday).

Meatless Monday is notable for being flexible, undogmatic and market based. Salon.com called it “utterly doable, utterly sane.” It also conforms to the USDA’s own guidelines, as well as those of the American Heart Association and the World Cancer Research Institute. The USDA recommends people should reduce saturated fat in their diet, eat more lean protein in the form of fish and seafood, and increase their intake of fruits and vegetables.

There’s a strong environmental, health and social justice case for a vegan diet. But that is not what Meatless Monday promotes. We do not think that all-or-nothing approaches will persuade the majority of Americans to make healthy choices more often. Rather, we embrace a flexible, commonsense, something-is-better-than-nothing approach. We acknowledge that consumption of lean, responsibly-raised meat can be part of a healthy diet.

Meatless Monday has been shown to be an effective vehicle for getting people to think about and discuss the choices they make and the impact those choices have on themselves and the planet. Meatless Monday partners, myself included, welcome any opportunity to participate in a conversation about how we can be healthier, as individuals and as a society.

We take it that the mischaracterization of the campaign as anti-meat, anti-choice and anti-farmer is based on an honest misunderstanding of Meatless Monday goals and tactics. Now that we have cleared that up, let’s have a genuine discourse about what we eat, and what we should be eating.

Thomas H. Dennison is director of the Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University.

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