Fewer than three weeks on the job and I have the privilege of writing my first official blog post about the release of exciting survey results from Sodexo’s Meatless Monday Initiative. Who is Sodexo and what are the exciting results, you ask?
First, let me introduce myself. I am the new Project Director of the Johns Hopkins Meatless Monday Project, which was launched in 2003 to serve as the scientific adviser to the national Meatless Monday campaign, a non-profit initiative of The Monday Campaigns in association with the Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health (JHSPH). I recently completed my MSPH degree in Human Nutrition and certification as a Registered Dietitian through a coordinated program at the JHSPH. I am thrilled to be back at the Center in this capacity, and look forward to applying my knowledge, skills and enthusiasm surrounding food, nutrition, public health, and environmental sustainability to direct this exciting and dynamic project. Read More >
The Meatless Monday campaign just gained America’s protector of natural resources and heritage as one of its latest supporters. The U.S. Department of the Interior is one of Sodexo’s more than 2,000 corporate and government clients, which the food service giant encouraged to adopt its Meatless Monday initiative.
Sodexo announced today that it is all part of the company’s ongoing efforts to boost health and wellness and promote sustainability in the North American communities where it serves as many as 10 million meals a day. The Department of Interior joins several of Sodexo’s well-known clients, such as Toyota and Northern Trust Bank in adopting Meatless Monday.
The non-profit Meatless Monday campaign, which is operated out of New York City, was launched in 2003 with the help of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Center for a Livable Future. The public health campaign was first started simply to reduce America’s saturated fat consumption by 15%, following the recommendations of the Healthy People 2010 report issued by then U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher in 2000.
While reducing potential negative health effects, such as cardiovascular disease, remains a key goal, a few years ago the initiative expanded its focus to environmental impacts of intensive meat production. Those impacts can be quite substantial. Research suggests that it takes 20 times the amount of fossil-fuel energy to produce conventional beef protein than plant-based protein. According to a study out of California, it takes about 2,000 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef. That’s almost ten times more than the 220 gallons water needed to produce a pound of tofu.
A Sodexo spokesperson says the Department of Interior reports that, “the population of customers at DOI is very health and environmentally conscience, so that Meatless Monday is a welcome addition to our program.” In a Sodexo news release, Toyota executive Will Nicklas was quoted as saying, “Meatless Monday has been successful here primarily because Sodexo helps our customers understand that it is not at all about becoming vegetarians or even weight loss, it’s about taking easy steps to guard our health and be good stewards of our environment.” Read More >
Oprah celebrates Meatless Monday
Talk show host Oprah Winfrey may have just encouraged a large segment of her 30 million viewers to join the Meatless Monday movement following her latest show which gave us a rare glimpse into where some of our meat comes from.
The Meatless Monday campaign’s national awareness has more than doubled in the last 2 years. An FGI Research survey found that 30 percent of Americans are aware of the public health campaign. My guess is that following Oprah’s very public backing and the announcement last month that the food service company Sodexo implemented Meatless Monday national and global awareness is going to sky rocket!
The episode, entitled “Oprah and 378 Staffers Go Vegan: The One Week Challenge” featured celebrated “veganist” Kathy Freston and journalist Michael Pollan, best known for his book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” A large chunk of the show followed Freston encouraging sometimes belligerent but mostly willing Oprah Show staff members to eat a vegan diet for one week and their testimonials on how they did. A few employees said the experience helped them lose weight and become healthier. Following her experience, Oprah decided, quite enthusiastically, that her studio’s café would do Meatless Monday every week.
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Center for a Livable Future helped launch the national Meatless Monday campaign back in 2003. The campaign’s primary focus is to reduce America’s saturated fat consumption by 15%, following the recommendations of the Healthy People 2010 report issued by then U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher in 2000. Key recommendations from the recently released Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2010 reiterate the message that we need to reduce our consumption of solid and saturated fats.
Read More >
The national non-profit Meatless Monday campaign is proving to be “The Little Engine That Could” in the environmental public health world. In just the last two years national awareness of Meatless Monday more than doubled. According to a commissioned survey by FGI Research more than 30 percent of Americans are aware of the public health campaign, compared to 15 percent awareness in 2008. No doubt the announcement last week that Sodexo, a food service company which serves more than 10 million North American customers a day, has adopted the campaign will only help to increase Meatless Monday’s popularity.
A number of Sodexo facilities including the Johns Hopkins Hospital’s Cobblestone Cafe′ conducted their own Meatless Monday campaigns. However, starting this month Sodexo expanded the initiative to all of its more than 900 hospital clients, “as part of its ongoing effort to promote health and wellness.” In the spring, the company will offer menus and materials to all of its corporate and government clients and in the fall it will officially implement Meatless Monday at its “Sodexo-served” colleges and schools.
Sodexo joins a growing list of Meatless Monday supporters. Some of the most recent high-profile Meatless Monday converts include Moe’s Southwest Grill; Mario Batali, Celebrity Chef and restaurateur; Laurie David, An Inconvenient Truth producer and dozens of municipalities, universities, colleges, and restaurants. Read More >
When I was a teacher, a common gripe among the staff was that the parent’s “weren’t doing their job” at home and how were “we,” the teachers supposed to make up for students whose parents didn’t read to them or encourage them to do their homework. This ongoing blame game ranged from discussions of reading ability, to discipline, to food. We often think that the home is where habits for a healthy life, or a disciplined student, or a physically fit individual begin and end. A new study from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health pokes a hole in our teacher’s lounge argument, showing that the relationship between dietary intake of parents and their children is weak, grows weaker with age and is growing weaker over time.
The study looked at parent-child dietary studies from different countries, including the U.S. over the past 30 years and found that across different countries, with similar and different methods, the relationship was weak. What does this mean? Does it mean that parents have no influence over what their children eat, and the type of eaters they become as they grow up? No. Individuals have a complex relationship with food and children are no different. Parents are a part of the relationship, but this study shows they are only a small part of what determines what and how we eat. It also shows that this relationship is becoming less strong as our society progresses. The weakening relationship could exist for many reasons, including: the growing independence of children, changing parenting styles, changes in our food system, increases in the amount of working mothers or changes in our home and social environments. An anecdotal article about award winning chefs and their kids from the Baltimore Sun recently, would attest to parent’s lack of influence. In the article, even James Beard award winning Chefs lunchbox concoctions can’t compete with lunchables. Read More >
Today marked the launch of Meatless Monday on Johns Hopkins University’s Homewood campus. Elaborate banners of cartoon cows, chickens and pigs that read, “Monday is my day off!” greeted students as they entered JHU Dining Service’s three
Banners welcome students
main dining areas: Levering Food Court, Fresh Food Court and Nolan’s. The Center for a Livable Future, the Office of Sustainability at Hopkins and several student groups including: Students for Environmental Action (SEA), Eco-Reps, and Real Food Hopkins lent JHU Dining a hand in launching the campaign. Meatless Monday asks students to reduce their meat consumption by 15%, by giving up meat once a week, in an attempt to improve health for not only the students themselves, but the environment as well.
Volunteers handed out stickers and pamphlets, while informational posters peppered throughout the cafeterias explained the benefits of going “meatless” once a week. Meatless Monday is a perfect compliment to the Hopkins Sustainability Office’s “Know your Food Print” campaign, whose goal is to educate Hopkins students about how their food choices affect the environment.
JHU Dining’s Executive Chef Michael Gueiss, said he was excited to bring Meatless Monday on campus. While all the meat options remained on the menu, Chef Gueiss made sure that there were plenty of new and some familiar vegetarian meal options available for customers. The meals ranged from new vegetarian pizza options and special lentil soup to a portabella mushroom cheese -melt with sautéed onions. Read More >
It looks like the “Eat less meat, eat better meat” motto, first coined by sustainable cattle rancher and author Nicolette Hahn Niman, is catching on. According to School Food FOCUS, a national initiative dedicated to helping urban school districts buy healthier, more sustainable and locally sourced food, four of the nation’s largest school districts launched their own “Better Beef Days.”
According to a School Food FOCUS spokesperson, Meredith Modzelewski, Denver Public Schools, Portland Public Schools, Oakland Unified School District and San Diego Unified School District, decided to serve sustainably raised beef to students this week to coincide with National School Lunch Week.
Modzelewski says the food service directors for each of the districts came up with idea on their own following a School Food FOCUS brainstorming session organized to help schools find ways to purchase healthier poultry and bread products.
“It all started with school food service directors who wanted to talk with producers of grass-fed beef,” says Modzelewski. “This was really a grassroots effort,” added Modzelewski. [no pun intended] While not every district was able to source grass-fed beef, all the “better” meat purchased – ranges from local and grass-fed to antibiotic-free, added hormone-free and preservative-free.
I’m particularly excited to see that the Oakland School District, which adopted its own Meatless Monday campaign this year, is also taking part in the “Better Beef Days.” Some may think these initiatives send mixed messages to kids. I disagree. In fact, (I can’t believe I’m saying this), even the National Pork Board noted in a Chicago Times article last month that Meatless Monday serves as, “a message of moderation and quality.” Read More >
Some 14 million listeners tuned in this morning to hear National Public Radio’s most popular program, Morning Edition, give extensive coverage to the Meatless Monday campaign. The 8-1/2 minute segment, “Campaign Aims To Make Meatless Mondays Hip,” included an interview with Meatless Monday Founder, Sid Lerner. Reporter Allison Aubrey accompanied Lerner as he visited Dovetail, a popular New York City restaurant that has adopted Meatless Monday, and interviewed patrons sampling the offerings on the meatless menu.
The Meatless Monday Campaign was developed in 2003 in association with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Center for a Livable Future. The goal of the campaign is to reduce saturated fat consumption by 15 percent by forgoing meat one day a week.
As the Baltimore City Public Schools system continues the transformation of its food service for more than 80,000 kids (see food revolution), a new survey reveals that students and parents are hungry for more. Melissa Mahoney, the districts “top chef”, nutritionist and dietitian , sent out the survey to measure opinions about the ongoing changes and what they’d like to see in the future. Some of the biggest changes include the introduction of Meatless Monday menu options, fresh local fruits, and the creation of the Great Kids Farm as an education center focused on food and agriculture.
The survey link was presented to parents and students on the March, April and May school menus that are sent home in addition to being permanently placed on the “What you need to know” section of the district website. Parents and students were encouraged complete a web-based survey reflecting their opinions about current menu items and preferences not only for future specific menu items, but attitudes about how the district should be focusing its initiatives. Read More >
Anna Lappé’s new book Diet for a Hot Planet is critical. It is critical because it helps fill a significant gap in the literature that was previously identified by the Johns Hopkins Center for Livable Future.
And thus, in an accessible and comprehensive manner, Diet for a Hot Planet is critical to understanding how inextricably linked food is with climate change. But to do so, Lappé conveys that we, as the reader, must understand: (1) the food-life-cycle, from its roots in the ground to going back to the ground as waste and (2) that “we are not bystanders.”
The food life-cycle and its connection with climate change
Diet for a Hot Planet emphasizes that the global food system is connected to climate change “within nearly every sector of our economy;” from waste and wastewater to our energy supply to transportation to industry to forestry to building structures to agriculture. Throughout the book, it becomes clear how “the entire global food chain may account for roughly one third of what’s heating our planet.”
Not all of the climate impact from food is related to livestock. Yet, with 70% of all agricultural land tied up in livestock production, red meat and dairy products may account for as much as 48% of the global warming effect. Lappé’s book underscores the importance of thinking about the journey from livestock to edible meat production, especially regarding methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions; that, she teaches us, has a much greater negative impact on global warming than carbon dioxide (CO2). Read More >
