Meatless

The Humane Society makes the (video) case for Meatless Monday.

Actually, they make the case for meatless Monday-Sunday–otherwise known as vegetarianism. Lots of people feel helpless when it comes to the scale of environmental destruction humans are inflicting on the planet. I always tell them the simplest, most powerful, thing they can do right away is stop eating meat. Not only is industrial beef (and chicken, and pork) farming killing the planet, it’s killing you.

Quitting meat cold-turkey (sorry) isn’t that easy, if only because meat is so ingrained in our food culture. So it’s hard to think of what else to eat, and we crave fat. But it’s easy in this sense: you will feel a lot better, and you will lose weight. AND you will be doing something meaningful for the planet. AND for our health care costs.

But while I think it’s okay, if you want to, to eat some meat on occasion, and that any cutbacks you can make are a good thing, I think asking Americans to go without meat just one day a week is a pretty lame target. Yes, I am sure that a single meat-free day a week is all the Humane Society figures they can ask meat-addled Americans to aspire to. But as noted earlier, these times call for radical, not incremental, solutions. And Meatless Monday just isn’t very radical. So let’s aim for Meatless, full stop, instead.