I fought Sugar Ray Robinson so many times it’s a wonder I don’t have diabetes. Jake La Motta, age 90 in the Broadway play The Lady and the Champ.

Introduction: Eating Veggies on Monday

I favor a diet pattern of mostly plants, fruits, grains, legumes and other foods not in the dairy, meat or seafood categories. Given the obesity crisis in America, I think this is a pattern that would serve others, as well. Something dramatic needs to be done to convince the public to make healthier food choices. Much is being done to promote vegetarian diets by health organizations and public interest groups. One effort is advanced by an organization called Monday Campaign Inc. in cooperation with the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. It is called Meatless Mondays. The idea is that at least this one day be set aside for vegetarian options. The simple goals are to promote sustainable agriculture and boost dietary health. According to the U.N., animal agriculture is a major source of greenhouse gases and climate change. It also wastes resources. It takes 7,000 kg of grain to make 1,000 kg of beef.

The USDA Mentions Meatless Mondays

In a short period of time, the meatless Mondays idea has been promoted in thousands of corporate cafeterias, restaurants and schools.

The other day, the United States Department of Agriculture mentioned the campaign in its “Greening Headquarters Update,” a newsletter posted at the agency website. A suggestion was made that employees might want to participate in the Meatless Monday initiative as “one simple way to reduce your environmental impact while dining at our cafeterias.”

Here are excerpts:

In addition to the many USDA employees who come to our cafeterias, thousands of tourists and visitors also come to our cafeterias each month…our cafeterias (will become) models for healthy eating and “sustainable” operations…encourage the use of food and beverage items that are fresh and locally grown or otherwise made or procured in the closest possible proximity to Washington D.C., and the preparation of meals that contribute to a balanced diet and contain the fewest possible additives…

One simple way to reduce your environmental impact while dining at our cafeterias is to participate in the Meatless Monday initiative. This international effort, as the name implies, encourages people not to eat meat on Mondays…there are many health concerns related to the excessive consumption of meat. While a vegetarian diet could have a beneficial impact on a person’s health and the environment, many people are not ready to make that commitment. Because “Meatless Monday” involves only one day a week, it is a small change that could produce big results. Did you notice that our cafeterias have tasty meatless options? So you can really help yourself and the environment while having a good vegetarian meal!

Who could object? The little campaign seemed perfectly non-denominational, neither Republican nor Democratic, nor it did it take a stand on gay marriage, access to contraception, immigration reform or better enforcement of the Constitutional requirement for the  separation of church and steak.

Well, guess again.

A Vigorous Protest

Within 24 hours, a doo doo storm erupted. You might think the Department had called for a restriction on the sanctified rights of high school students to bring  automatic weapons or hand grenades to class. As reported in the New York Times, livestock producers and some members of Congress pitched hissy fits.

Among the brave stalwarts standing tall for the meat and other dead creatures industry were the following Republicans:

• Steve King, Congressman from Iowa - USDA HQ meatless Mondays!! At the Dept. of Agriculture? Heresy! I’m not grazing there. I will have the double rib-eye Mondays instead.

• John Cornyn, Senator from Texas - In some of the toughest times they’ve seen in recent memory, Texas cattle ranchers and farmers deserve an Administration who works with them, not one who undermines them with boneheaded decisions from bureaucrats in Washington.

• Chuck Grassley, Senator from Iowa: This is a reminder to USDA that it’s supposed to advocate for American agriculture, not against it.

Grassley aide Jill Kozeny later told the Des Moines Register that the senator was eating meat throughout the day, including a beef sandwich at lunch. “Sen. Grassley didn’t have meat for breakfast but he had some beef jerky after lunch, for good measure, and he’s planning on a steak tonight,” she said.

A spokesperson for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association called the USDA support for Meatless Mondays “a slap in the face of the people who every day are working to make sure we have food on the table.”

The Outcome

In less than 24 hours after the protests were expressed, a spokesperson for the USDA declared that the offending newsletter item was not approved at the highest level of the Department. The clarification noted that the USDA does not endorse “Meatless Monday.” (Source: Amy Harmon, “Retracting a Plug for Meatless Mondays,” New York Times, July 25, 2012.)

ABC News quoted Walter Willett, chairman of the nutrition department at the Harvard School of Public Health to the effect that the USDA has a history of caving to special interests. “There’s a lot of schizophrenia within the department,” Willett said. He mentioned USDA’s promotion of cheese and beef consumption despite its own warnings about saturated fats. “If you really believed in the USDA dietary guidelines…Meatless Monday is a great thing to do.” He said the offending newsletter rightfully depicted red meat as environmentally taxing, inasmuch as cows take two to three years to mature before they can be sold, they use a considerable amount of resources and they produce methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. “Without question, the 1,000-pound steer in the room in terms of environmental impact is beef.” (Source: Sydney Lupkin, “Meat Industry Has Beef with Meatless Monday, Forces USDA to Retract Newsletter,” July 26, 2012.)

In response to the craven capitulation of U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack to the meat industry, and to address the misinformation campaign by the Right-Wing politicians who pitched a fit about Meatless Mondays, the dean of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health wrote a letter to Secretary Vilsack explaining the merits of Meatless Mondays. Dean Michael J. Klag, MD, MPH explained why an endorsement of Meatless Monday is actually pro-agriculture. He outlined how the meatless day could in fact benefit the health of Americans. He offered three specific ways that the campaign deserves USDA support:

1.  “… Increasing the amount of fruits and vegetables in a weekly diet conforms to the USDA’s own Dietary Guidelines designed to improve public health and reduce the risk of chronic disease. As USDA recommends, people should reduce saturated fat in their diet, eat more lean protein in the form of fish and seafood and increase their intake of fruits and vegetables.”
2. The Meatless Monday campaign is pro-agriculture and inclusive of all agricultural producers, not just beef producers.
3. With meat and dairy price hikes resulting from the recent drought, a reduction in these foods will help the bottom lines of Americans’ household budgets.

The full text of the letter to Secretary Vilsack is available here.

If you are not under the influence of these and other Republican politicians or the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association or other such groups, enjoy meatless Mondays—and as many other vegetarian days throughout the week as your tastes and health status permit.

Be well and look on the bright side.

I have been following a vegan diet since August of 2011. I backslide now and then, but less often as time passes. My inspiration for adopting a plant-based diet is my wife Carol. When she first announced that we were going on a plant-based diet, I went along. Why? Because I’m such an agreeable mate. No, just kidding, I’m agreeable enough but the real reason was that I thought it was an approach to quality of life that was well worth trying out for a spell.

There was persuasive data from considerable research that seemed to support such a food pattern. The case for a plant-based diet has been articulated by Drs. Caldwell Esselstyn Jr., T. Colin Campbell and Dean Ornish, though many others could be mentioned. In addition, I found my resolve to stay with the vegan-like program reinforced by a well-organized support system of local and national groups. Additional resolve occurred when I noted significant positive changes in my before and after blood lipid panel scores. While I felt great before starting the diet and remain “weller than well” a year into it, the experiment has now become a part of my lifestyle. I do not follow a plant-based diet to manage a medical problem or because I ever struggled with weight, body image or a compulsive relationship with food. (These problem-alleviation motives are compelling for many who make diet changes.) I enjoy a plant-power diet for quality of life reasons.

There is one more reason I readily consented to follow my wife’s lead in pursuing a plant-based diet—the treatment of animals. This concern is one I felt in high school after reading, “The Jungle,” Upton Sinclair’s classic novel that exposed stockyard horrors in Chicago during the early years of the 20th century. Sinclair’s depiction and the public revulsion at the risks of disease transmissions (plus a few horror stories about employees who fell into vats or rendering tanks, becoming ingredients in ground beef) gave me pause. But, over time, I put the matter out of mind, like nearly everyone else. I found it unpleasant to think about the suffering of animals.

However, thanks to the vegan community, PETA and individuals like Philip Wollen, I have revisited the matter. Now I suspect that a diet revolution is needed and will someday come to pass, though probably not in the lifetime of most who inhabit the planet at present.

So, who is Phillip Wollen? Philip Wollen is an Australian philanthropist and former Vice-President of Citibank. He spoke on May 16, 2012 at a debate sponsored by the St James Ethics Centre and the Wheeler Centre in Australia. (Note: I will offer a link to his speech at the end of this essay.) What he said reminded me of remarks expressed by Emma Goldman in an 1898 speech in Detroit entitled, “Living My Life,” “There are . . . some potentates I would kill by any and all means at my disposal. They are Ignorance, Superstition, and Bigotry—the most sinister and tyrannical rulers on earth.”

After listening to Mr. Wollen, I’m ready to offer a fourth category to the list of “sinister and tyrannical potentates”—Carnism. Killing and eating other creatures might make my potentate hit list, if I had one.  )Carnism is the invisible belief system, or ideology, that conditions people to eat certain animals.) Click on the video for an illustration of its use.

There were six speakers at the debate: three made the case for getting animals off of the menu and three defended the status quo. Here are highlights of a few points offered by Mr. Wollen:

• Animals must be off the menu … tonight they are screaming in terror in the slaughterhouse, in crates and cages—(in) vile, ignoble gulags of despair.
• Meat is the new asbestos—more murderous than tobacco.
• CO₂, methane and nitrous oxide from the livestock industry are killing our oceans with acidic, hypoxic dead zones…90% of small fish are ground into pellets to feed livestock. Vegetarian cows are now the world’s largest ocean predator. The oceans are dying in our time. By 2048 all our fisheries will be dead. The lungs and the arteries of the earth.
• Only 100 billion people have ever lived. 7 billion alive today. And we torture and kill 2 billion animals every week. Ten thousand entire species are wiped out every year because of the actions of one species. We are now facing the 6th mass extinction in cosmological history. If any other organism did this a biologist would call it a virus. It is a crime against humanity of unimaginable proportions.
• Animal rights is now the greatest social justice issue since the abolition of slavery.
• There are over 600 million vegetarians in the world. That is bigger than the US, England, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Canada, Australia combined! If we were one nation we would be bigger than the 27 countries in the European Union! Despite this massive footprint, we are still drowned out by the raucous huntin’, shootin’, killin’ cartels who believe that violence is the answer—when it shouldn’t even be a question.
• Meat is a killing industry—animals, us and our economies. Medicare has already bankrupted the US. They will need $8 trillion invested in Treasury bills just to pay the interest. It has precisely zero! Cornell and Harvard say’s that the optimum amount of meat for a healthy diet is precisely ZERO.
• Water is the new oil. Nations will soon be going to war for it. Underground aquifers that took millions of years to fill are running dry. It takes 50,000 litres of water to produce one kilo of beef.
• One billion people today are hungry. Twenty million people will die from malnutrition. Cutting meat by only 10% will feed 100 million people. Eliminating meat will end starvation forever.
• If everyone ate a Western diet, we would need two planet Earths to feed them. We only have one. And she is dying. Greenhouse gas from livestock is 50% more than transport—planes, trains, trucks, cars, and ships.
• Poor countries sell their grain to the West while their own children starve in their arms. And we feed it to livestock. So we can eat a steak? Am I the only one who sees this as a crime? Every morsel of meat we eat is slapping the tear-stained face of a starving child. When I look into her eyes, should I be silent?
• The earth can produce enough for everyone’s need. But not enough for everyone’s greed. If any nation had developed weapons that could wreak such havoc on the planet, we would launch a preemptive military strike and bomb it into the Bronze Age. But it is not a rogue state. It is an industry. The good news is we don’t have to bomb it. We can just stop buying it.
• George Bush was wrong. The Axis of Evil doesn’t run through Iraq, or Iran or North Korea. It runs through our dining tables.
• This (removing meat from the menu) is the Swiss Army Knife of the future—it solves our environmental, water, health problems and ends cruelty forever. The Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stones. This cruel industry will end because we run out of excuses.
• Meat is like one and two cent coins. It costs more to make than it is worth.
• And farmers are the ones with the most to gain. Farming won’t end. It would boom. Only the product line would change. Farmers would make so much money they wouldn’t even bother counting it.

There is much more, the best of which are in the non-data but highly passionate remarks that you can experience in the video. Mr. Wollen summed up in a manner that informed a part of the title of this essay, suggesting that if meat came off the menu, “governments will love us. New industries would emerge and flourish. Health insurance premiums would plummet. Hospital waiting lists would disappear. Hell We’d be so healthy; we’d have to shoot someone just to start a cemetery!”

Of course, not just the other side in the debate but many food experts and the entire meat industry would not agree with Mr. Wollen’s claim that animal consumption causes a wide range of cancers and heart disease. But, they might have a hard time answering his challenge to show evidence of any one disease that is caused by a vegetarian diet.

I encourage you to watch the video—it’s only ten minutes in duration. It contains some memorable phrases, such as the following: “The peace map is drawn on a menu. Peace is not just the absence of war. It is the presence of justice. Justice must be blind to race, color, religion or species. If she is not blind, she will be a weapon of terror. And there is unimaginable terror in those ghastly Guantanamos. If slaughterhouses had glass walls, we wouldn’t need this debate…Let’s get the animals off the menu and out of these torture chambers. Please vote for those who have no voice.

You can read and/or listen to an excerpt of the speech here.

Be well, look on the bright side, think carefully about what you eat and consider justice and kindness as well as health and good taste.