Even one meatless day a week – a Meatless Monday, which is what we do in our household – if everybody in America did that, that would be the equivalent of taking 20 million mid-sized Sedans off the road.
Michael Pollan talking about Meatless Monday, an idea that has been taking the health and environmental communities by storm. I’ll post a more extensive article this afternoon – exam in the morning -, but how about going Meatless today?
It would be interesting to study whether such a campaign results in an actual reduction in meat consumption versus, say, simply a shift in the timing of meat consumption. Earth Hour is a similar idea… people agree to not, say, run their washing machine during that window but will do a load sooner or later. But of course there are no suitable substitutes for electricity and there are for meat.
I suspect that the reality is somewhere in the middle… there is some reduction in consumption but less than 1/7th of weekly consumption. 20 million cars off the road is likely an overstatement.