The Meat Lover's Meatless Cookbook - Kim O'Donnel [3]
I knew about “Meatless Monday,” a public health campaign that Johns Hopkins University had launched back in 2003 to help Americans reduce saturated fats by 15 percent by 2010. Intellectually, the idea made good sense, but gastronomically, I wondered, could it be truly tasty and satisfying?
Most of us meat lovers, this one included, know we could stand to lower our cholesterol and drop a few pounds. Our problem isn’t believing the data, it’s the fear of change and the threat to our very personal relationship with food.
To wit: While filming in Huntington, West Virginia, for his reality show, Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver met fierce resistance from residents of the “unhealthiest city in America.” In the first episode, which premiered in March 2010, the camera meets a local radio announcer, who says: “We don’t want to sit around and eat lettuce all day. I don’t think Jamie has anything that can change this town. He can try all he wants.”
And yet, there’s never been a better opportunity for the change this book proposes. We’ve never been more concerned about where our food comes from, how it’s processed, and what this means for our health.
In the months leading up to its 2010 goal, the Meatless Monday message hit the mainstream, both here and abroad. In the past year, Baltimore City public schools became the first school district in the country to offer a meatless day in its cafeterias. San Francisco became the first U.S. city to pass a resolution for a weekly “Veg Day.” And celeb chef (and nose-to-tail lovin’ guy) Mario Batali began observing Meatless Monday in all fourteen of his restaurants. Across the Atlantic, Sir Paul McCartney launched Meat Free Monday in the UK, and the mayor of Ghent, Belgium, declared Thursdays as “Veggiedag.”
Such books as Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser and The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan became runaway best sellers, changing the collective consciousness about where and how we buy our food and what we put in our mouth. Schlosser was a coproducer of (and both he and Pollan appeared in) the documentary Food, Inc., an exposé of industrial agriculture that earned a 2010 Academy Award nomination. Today, according to USDA statistics, there are more than five thousand farmers’ markets across the country—including one just outside the White House—almost double what there were just ten years ago.
Healthy eating is now a priority at the White House; for the first time since World War II, there is an edible garden on the South Lawn. First lady Michelle Obama is now leading a nationwide effort to combat childhood obesity that includes public, private, and nonprofit partnerships at the local, state, and national level. (According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 17 percent of American school-age children and teens are obese.)
Without a doubt, the eat-less-meat-for-health buzz had fueled my curiosity, but what truly got me off my reticent duff to put these ideas into practice is the environmental piece of this equation.
Specifically, the wake-up call was a 2008 speech by Rajendra Pachauri, an Indian economist and the chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore). Here’s the gist of what Pachauri said: If there’s one thing that average citizens of the world can do to help the planet, it’s not recycling or trading in our gas-guzzlers for hybrid cars. It’s eating less meat.
A year later, in December 2009, Pachauri and McCartney addressed the European Parliament, urging leaders to implement a meatless day as a way to fight climate change. At the hearing, McCartney read a statement from Al Gore, who agrees that a meatless day “is a responsible and welcome component to a strategy for reducing global pollution.”
In a nutshell, here’s why: According to a 2006 report from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, livestock production is responsible for 18 percent of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions, major contributors