Meat Free Mondays launch in Australia

Could you give up eating meat for just one day a week? If you did, would it make any difference?

Do Something! and the Fry’s Family Foundation think the answer to both those questions is yes. They’re collaborating on a new Meat Free Mondays campaign through the Foodwise website. Here’s what they have to say about it:

Meat Free Mondays is a campaign encouraging Australians to go meat free for one day a week, for the good of their health and the good of their planet.

Here in Australia, we love our meat. As one of the world’s highest meat consuming countries, it has long dominated our dinner plates and taken centre stage in the very idea of being Australian.

The problem is, our love of meat has begun to take a big toll on both our health and the health of our planet.

Both nutritional and environmental experts say that by eating more plant-based foods and making simple reductions to how much meat we eat, we can find a much better balance.

That’s where we come in. Meat Free Mondays is a fun, positive and powerful way to raise awareness about the personal health and environmental benefits of reducing our meat consumption. Rather than asking Australians to become vegetarian or vegan, it’s about promoting choice and shining a light on the positive impact of that choice.

There are good nutritional reasons to eat more fruit and vegetables. Meat-based diets are also responsible for significantly more greenhouse gas emissions than plant-based diets. So it makes sense to eat less meat.

But making the shift from a meat-based diet to a vegetarian one is a big shift for most people and the scale of this change can scare people off. The idea behind Meat Free Mondays is to aim for a reduction in meat consumption, without asking people to give up meat entirely. By building up a community of people that don’t eat meat on a Monday, the hope is that people will support each other to reduce their meat consumption once a week, without having to make a big sacrifice. Maybe some of those people will then go on to eat less meat on other days, or even adopt a vegetarian diet.

It’s a clever approach to behaviour change and the Meat Free Mondays campaign has established a slick website, recruited Rosemary Stanton as campaign ambassador and provided a whole bunch of vegetarian recipes to support the campaign. You can sign up to the campaign, like their Facebook page or read the posts on the blog. It’s all very well put together and I hope it goes well.

I’ve had some peripheral involvement with the campaign during its establishment, as I am supervising a Masters student — Judy Friedlander — who has contributed research support. Judy’s articles are here and she is also blogging at Sustainable Food Matters.

And if you’re struggling to come up with vegetarian meals, and the recipes on the Meat Free Monday website don’t float your boat, my recommendation for the best vegetarian cookbook every is Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage Veg Every Day. Every recipe I’ve cooked from it has been an absolute winner!