Meatless Mondays is a campaign begun twenty years ago by a non-vegan advertising executive named Sid Lerner; it was designed to encourage people to reduce their meat consumption and gradually steer them towards positive, healthy change. The concept has been adopted by schools and hospitals and utilized as an outreach strategy by many vegetarian and vegan groups around the world. It’s
emblematic of the “gradualist” approach to adopting a plant-based diet.
But is it a wise strategy? Let’s look at the pros and the cons.
Gradualists argue that most people are unwilling or incapable of making drastic changes in their diet overnight, and would find it too daunting to suddenly abandon all animal foods and sustain themselves on plant foods only. Discovering that they can do so effectively and painlessly on Mondays may lead them, down the road, to going meatless two days a week, then three, then four . . . until one day they wake up and discover that they have become vegan—and it wasn’t so difficult, after all. Gradualists also argue that even moderate reduction in animal food intake will improve people’s health, and when they see that improvement, they may then trend more and more plant-based.
Meatless Monday serves too as an approach that answers the criticism that vegans are too dogmatic or strident or absolutist. That knock on vegans is disarmed by the good-natured suggestion: “Hey, all I’m saying is why don’t you try this one day a week and see how it feels?” It sounds eminently sensible and moderate. Some gradualists also make the case that merely reducing one’s meat intake by, say, one-seventh will bring on a drastic reduction in the environmental harms of animal agriculture.
Let’s examine those arguments one-by-one.
Is it too daunting for a person to change his or her diet dramatically overnight? Well, that depends on the person. For some, doing so may indeed seem unthinkable. But countless vegans have “origin stories” in which they had a sudden revelation—whether it was after looking in the eyes of a cow, or witnessing a truck full of pigs being sent to slaughter, or watching a documentary like Forks Over Knives, or learning of the threats that animal agriculture poses to our climate and our environment—and went vegan overnight, never looking back.
This very website was created by such a person—Bryan Dennstedt, who saw Forks Over Knives, turned vegan, and never looked back.
The Meatless Monday approach reinforces the unhelpful idea that dietary change is difficult. “We know you’d never be able to limit yourself to eating healthy food seven days a week, so let’s see if you can manage it for one day—it’s going to be hard, but maybe you can pull it off.” If the goal is to create more vegans, there’s a real risk to promoting the idea that going vegan is an arduous task.
Another risk is the level of dedication that practitioners of Meatless Monday can be expected to demonstrate. After all, anyone who has made a serious commitment to the vegan lifestyle for the animals, or for their own health, or for the health of the planet, would likely resist a pepperoni pizza brought into the office by co-workers. Someone who is merely practicing Meatless Monday as a token gesture towards any of those ends has not made an ethical or health-based renunciation of meat, so might well indulge in a slice of that pepperoni pizza, even if it’s brought into the office on a Monday, because after all, they’d be entitled to eat it freely on Tuesday, anyway, so what difference does a day make?
Would the health benefits accruing to Meatless Monday practitioners help persuade them to go fully plant-based? That’s highly unlikely. Even presuming that one’s weekly Meatless Monday is rich in optimal whole plant foods, and oil-free and sugar-free, one day of healthy eating per week is unlikely to trump six days of unhealthy eating. People who have eaten their way into metabolic syndrome won’t undo it with one day per week of healthy eating. And therein lies another risk to the Meatless Monday approach—the likelihood of disappointment when a person’s health status doesn’t change, or even deteriorates.
As for the environment—well, if the planet gets a say in this, you could be sure it would say that it’s way too late for Meatless Monday.
In the end, everyone transitioning to a plant-based diet will do so at their own pace. But don’t undercut yourself by assuming that you can’t make dramatic changes quickly. There’s nothing so hard about limiting yourself to human foods: fruits, vegetables, whole grains, mushrooms, legumes, nuts and seeds. Be open to the possibility of going vegan at a fast pace—or even overnight.
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