So . . . I heard about this Meatless Monday fad yesterday, and thought I'd write about it today (it seemed fitting enough). I'm not going to go into what I think about the idea, though those who know me (or read this blog, for example this post) could probably figure out whether or not I will be participating.
What I would like to discuss is whether this endeavour will be successful in reaching its (fairly vague) goals. The website for the Meatless Monday movement claims that going meatless one day per week (alliteratively Monday) will "improve personal health and the health of our planet." Because, according to them, eating red meat is unhealthy and the production of red meat coincides with a lot of buzzwords of the green movement, cutting red meat consumption by 15% will go far to making our world a utopia.
My first thought is that this should work, at least in comparison to a less-specific plan such as "I will eat less meat." By scheduling the non-meat consumption day, a person is far more likely to stick to it; we tend to be poor judges when it comes to general goals (e.g. I will try to work out more). It is easy to rationalize our behaviour and not achieve our goals if we don't have parameters.
On the other hand, people also overcompensate when it comes to stuff like this. For example, if you begin a new exercise regimen, you may feel as though you have earned the right to more calories (well, I did walk across the street to Baskin-Robbins, give me a sundae! And because it's not Monday, put some meat on it!). What often happens, though, is that you consume more calories than you burned. So with a program like Meatless Monday, you may overindulge on other days because you are doing something virtuous by "sacrificing" on Monday, and therefore have earned the right to some vice (like eating a KFC Double Down on Tuesday, for breakfast).
Furthermore, the benefits (to the participants and the planet) are sketchy. Looking at the "Why Go Meatless" section of the website, they explain benefits of not eating red meat at all, not just lowering consumption. It is naive scientism to believe that these benefits accrue simply by reducing, as these correlations may not be linear. In other words, it may be that replacing meat with nuts reduces the incidence of heart disease by about 20%, but that doesn't mean that cutting half the meat out of your diet will reduce it by 10%. You may need to remove all, or almost all, of the meat in your diet to get any benefit.
(An example of this in another context is class sizes. People think that lowering class sizes results in better performance for students, but this benefit only appears once the class size is about 15 students or less. In other words, there isn't much difference in performance between a class size of 18 students and 28, but a big difference between 18 and 13.)
The last point I would make about this is the "saving the planet" part. Now, I understand that if everyone stopped eating meat that meat production would drop. But it is wrong to say that if meat consumption dropped by 15% that production would drop by 15%. A more likely result is that a reduction in purchase would lower prices. This price drop would, you guessed it, spur greater purchase of meat, thereby equalizing production about where it is now. I'm not saying don't participate in Meatless Monday - go ahead and eat soy at the beginning of the week if you want. I just have doubts about the overall effects of such a program.
Now someone get me a burger, I'm starvin'!
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