Meatless Mondays

Here's a break from the museum posts for a moment to bring you this public service announcement about Meatless Monday. Meatless Monday is a movement trying to get everyone to pledge to go meatless on Mondays which will benefit the planet by reducing the amount of meat we consume and therefore the amount of meat produced. The website contends that the meat industry is highly inefficient and uses vast quantities of our natural resources for very little relative return. It's also a health initiative since our high consumption of red meat in the US contributes to many illnesses such as cardio vascular disease, cancer, and diabetes.

If you've jumped on the green bandwagon, if you take your own bags to the grocery, if you have fluorescent light bulbs in your lamps, if you recycle, if you use recycled products or you've made any type of commitment to help our planet, then this is a natural next step for you. (Unless you're already a vegetarian or vegan, of course, for which you have my applause!) My family has a favorite vegetarian meal that we will be scheduling for Mondays (and I'll type up the recipe for the main course for an upcoming post) and I'll be hunting for more recipes on my favorite vegetarian/vegan websites. The kids are even on board- we talked about it at dinner today and everyone agreed that we won't eat meat on Mondays anymore, and they watched while I filled in the pledge on the website.

I've always admired people who've made the commitment to be vegetarians and I've kind of wanted to move in that direction for a long time but I like my dead cow, unfortunately, and I don't know what I'd EAT if I gave it up. By going at it one meal at a time, and now one whole day at a time, I can move in that direction and figure out what my family will eat at a more manageable pace. The new term that's being bandied about now is "flexitarian" and that's what I'm aiming for. Not vegetarian fully or all at once, but moving towards the vegetarian end of the spectrum in our overall diet both for the health of my family and the planet.