When super-chef and restaurateur Mario Batali, self proclaimed lover of all forms of pork, decided to join the Meatless Monday movement, Washington Post food writer Jane Black took notice. In an article published today, she wrote, “when Mario Batali starts to push people to eat their vegetables, you know something is happening.”

Black does an excellent job of laying out the many issues surrounding the public health campaign’s call for everyone to cut meat out of their diet just one day a week. The current Meatless Monday campaign was launched in 2003 in association with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health to reduce the amount of saturated fat in our diets by about 15 percent. The Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future (CLF) serves as a scientific advisor for the campaign. CLF recognizes that by adopting Meatless Monday individuals can improve their health and potentially reduce demand for meat products, particularly industrially produced meat, which use huge amounts of natural resources and pose significant public health and environmental risks.

Black says the meat industry is doing its best to “reverse the momentum” of Meatless Monday by launching its own “quiet campaigns.” One tired talking point it continues to use is that beans aren’t the best source of proteins. Industry leaders are also trying to discredit strong international research on livestock production’s contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions. We’ve addressed these hackneyed claims before in recent blog posts here and here. As for their claim, “that Americans do not eat too much meat,” pointing to government figures that show we’re not eating as much as U.S. dietary guidelines would allow, rings disingenuous to me. Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition at New York University, recent CLF Dodge Lecturer and author of Food Politics, explained to Black that those “dietary guidelines” are more of a reflection of political pressure from industry than from health experts. Black detailed those pressures:

In case after case, she said, policymakers have refrained from suggesting that Americans eat less meat. A 1977 Senate select committee led by Sen. George McGovern (D-S.D.) was forced to beat a hasty retreat after it initially recommended that Americans could cut their intake of saturated fat by reducing their consumption of red meat and dairy products. Its revised guidelines suggested choosing “meat, poultry and fish that will reduce saturated-fat intake.” (McGovern, whose constituents included many cattle ranchers, lost his seat in 1980.)

In 1992, when the USDA planned to recommend reduced meat intake in its new Food Pyramid, the industry howled again. It created a public-relations nightmare for the agency. Under intense media scrutiny, the USDA could not change its recommendations. It did, however, redesign the chart so that the two to three servings of meat that it had suggested as a maximum serving looked like a recommended amount.

And Black says the industry is lobbying hard to influence the upcoming dietary guidelines. She reports that the sixth and final meeting of the advisory committee proposing guidelines took place last week.
With well-known meat eaters like Chef Batalia and Baltimore City Public Schools food director Tony Geraci, who has admitted he too has a love of pork, supporting Meatless Monday I hope more people will see just how easy it is to skip meat once a week.

A quick side note regarding Meatless Monday, the campaign’s main web server crashed over the weekend and its website has been offline since Saturday. I’m told by Meatless Monday staff that they hope to have everything up and running soon. In the meantime you can learn more about the Meatless Monday campaign on CLF’s main website here.