Great News: Los Angeles Adopts Meatless Monday

It may have done it partly for the wrong reasons (combat climate change) but partly, and importantly, for the right reasons (animal welfare and also human health).

It is great that on October 24 this resolution was adopted: "the Council of the City of Los Angeles hereby declares all Mondays as 'Meatless Mondays' in support of comprehensive sustainability efforts as well as to further encourage residents to eat a more varied plant-based diet to protect their health and
protect animals."

It is very, very good that, before this declaration, several Californian and US colleges and universities had added Meatless Monday menus in their cafeterias; in Maryland the Baltimore City Public School System had become the first US school district to adopt a 100% Meatless Monday policy in 2009, followed by other school districts in the States; the Council of the District of Columbia had designated Mondays as "Meat Free Mondays"; the City of San Francisco had designated every Monday as "Veg Day"; the Green Cincinnati Plan had recommended going meatless one day a week; and a growing number of American cities had passed "resolutions encouraging residents to explore vegetarian eating to help
protect their health, the environment, and animals".

Los Angeles has now become the largest city in the US to sign a Meatless Monday resolution.

The U.S. Meatless Monday campaign was launched in 2003 in association with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Now the "cut out meat one day a week" program is active in 24 countries and growing.

A great number of celebrities are participating in the Meatless Mondays campaign: the picture above shows a collage of some of them.

To start Meatless Monday in your city, download the free Meatless Monday Community Toolkit.

Catholics already have a meatless day, Friday, and have been abstaining from meat on that day for centuries. This is to commemorate the day of the Crucifixion of Our Lord.

Some Catholics, like the blog Maxine, have proposed that the meatless day should be changed to Friday. I understand the rationale behind Meatless Monday: it is the beginning of the week, so we want to start it well, on the right foot. But I also understand the Catholics who say that they

believe it would be a nice gesture (changing Meatless Monday to Meatless Friday) that would allow our society to be on the same page - even if we are doing much of the same thing for different reasons.

It would be a good thing, bringing together people from different viewpoints, making Catholics nearer vegetarianism and vegetarians nearer Catholicism: both good perspectives on life.

Don't forget that Jesus banned animal sacrifices and Christianity is one of the very few religions that do not practice animal sacrifices.

Why We Should not Follow the Global Warming Scare Just to Make More People Vegetarians

Look at the statistics.

During the 1990s, the number of vegetarians in the UK almost doubled. Many people became vegetarian after various meat scares like BSE and Foot and Mouth, which led large numbers of people to rethink their diets, with 27 % of the population saying that they would consider giving up meat, and 12 % saying that they were vegetarian or meat-reducing.

Now that those scares, exaggerated and distorted by media and governments alike, have disappeared from the horizon, the number of UK vegetarians has decreased from 3 million in 2001 to 1.9 million in 2011.

The global warming theory is not a valid scientific theory. The predictions from computer models based on it have been refuted by the evidence of global temperatures going down when the predictions had said they would go up. And the behaviour of its supporters has contributed to discredit the theory repeatedly, including the latest global warmists scandal: "even the United Nations scientists who still support it formally asked for immunity from criminal prosecution before Rio de Janeiro's international climate talks in June 2012". 

When this hypothesis will be well and truly considered false, as all signs indicate it will, the number of vegetarians will go down again. Not only that: the vegetarian movement will have lost credibility for supporting a theory which, under even a superficial scrutiny, was clearly unfounded and fallacious.

We shouldn't bet on a losing team.

Even more importantly, we should only recommend a vegetarian diet on the strength of arguments that have a solid empirical and logical foundation. In Italy we say "Le bugie hanno le gambe corte" (Lies have short legs). Allegations which are not evidence based don't last in the long term.