Growing up in Louisiana, meat was served every single day.
Also, within my lifetime, my home state’s vulnerability to climate change has become apparent, as hurricanes have become more frequent and severe. But until recently, I didn’t link worse storms to more helpings of meat.
I never could have imagined celebrating a meatless Thanksgiving, like I just did.
As it turns out, this year marked my first meatless Thanksgiving after months of Meatless Mondays. But I am still eating meat six days a week. So 99% of that meatless Thursday was due to me being sick with the flu.
Still, I am going to count it as my first meatless Turkey Day, even if it wasn’t planned. Before this year, I felt no urge to go meatless, holiday or no holiday.
Meat was even the first thing I cooked on my own. Not on a stove. You know how parents are – “Don’t touch that stove if we’re not home.” Instead, I used a George Foreman Grill and made a pork chop. From there, you microwave some water with a bag of Top Ramen noodles and you have a meal. Bread would do just fine too.
That was my life and diet and it grew me to 6-foot-3-inches, 200 pounds. But recently, I began living meat-free for at least one day a week.
On that one day a week, it’s only non-meat for me. No red meat — and even though it’s Louisiana — I will also turn away fish or seafood on Meatless Monday.
My diet bucks national trends. In the United States, meat consumption has nearly doubled in the last century.
We are among the world’s top per-capita meat consumers, with the typical American eating more than three times the global average, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
But why is that so alarming? How does buying a piece of meat in the grocery store impact the world?
I started going without meat one day a week as a mere idea for an article. It wasn’t about animal rights. I didn’t do it because my health demanded it, though what I’d heard seemed promising.
Sometimes, I find myself doing things out of the goodness of my heart, only to discover that I’m doing something way bigger than I’d originally thought. That’s what happened for me with Meatless Monday.
Meatless Monday? Climate? How do these even correlate? Let’s put a pin right here and dive into some details.
What difference does it make to stop eating meat for one day?
Of course, the big question is: what difference does it all really make? In the United States, we consume three times more meat than the global average. This meat-heavy diet can lead to all types of health risks including diabetes, heart disease and obesity. And that’s just our bodies.
Now what about the health of the planet?
Joy Lehman, associate director of the Meatless Monday campaign, breaks it down. “One quarter-pound beef hamburger takes 425 gallons of water and the equivalent energy to charge your phone for six months to produce.”
That much water and electricity are hard to forget. Which is unfortunate because meat has always been a staple. It connected my family and so many Black families across the South. Really across the world.
Let’s bring it home for a second. My great-grandpaw used to be a butcher. No one has calculated the amount of water and electricity it took to fuel his livelihood. But it did have a personal cost: he lost a finger while butchering beef at his job. He said it “felt like nothing” because that’s how quickly it happened.
Those same four fingers on that left hand kept working, keeping our family fed. One hog or cow could feed a whole family. I heard stories about how, when I was younger, the men would gather around out back and clean out the catch and disperse pieces throughout the households. Even until this day, if my grandma gets steaks or bags of shrimp, she will make calls to disperse the meat throughout the family.
Every Friday my family gathers, and there’s some kind of meat on the grill or in the oven. There’s never a holiday where there isn’t some form of meat. Whether it’s ham or turkey, hell even a hen. It’s just something I can’t escape.
We can actually make a difference by starting off small.
“Many people are surprised at how impactful eating more plant-based meals and less meat can be, even one day a week,” Lehman said.
Basically, if more people gave up meat for one day each week, it would start a domino effect.
“It helps reduce agriculture water use and waste, land use and also fights species loss,” said Lehman. “If everyone ate less meat, on Meatless Monday or any other day, the impact would be significant.”
What is Meatless Monday?
Though not as well known in the South, Meatless Monday has a long history in the U.S. At the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, scientists and experts have taught the public-health benefits of meat reduction for more than 20 years.
Formerly associated with homefront, war-time efforts, the modern Meatless Monday campaign re-started as a clever way to improve public health.
In 2003, Sid Lerner, a mastermind of marketing, and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health launched the campaign with assistance from the Center for a Livable Future.
The campaigns’ founders wanted to bring attention to the consumption side of animal agriculture. Did Americans know they were consuming more meat on average than the rest of the world? wondered Becky Ramsing, senior program officer at the Center for a Livable Future.
The original Meatless Monday dates back to efforts during World War I in 1917, when citizens sacrificed meat to conserve resources for the fights going on overseas. Lerner thought it would be compelling to bring back this practice, then known as Meatless Tuesdays, but with a focus on individual health.
Today, the Center for a Livable Future continues the Meatless Monday campaign as a science-based reminder that consuming too much meat can be unhealthy.
But the campaign has grown to also focus on the health of the planet.
“We connect those dots between eating less meat and health, eating less meat and climate, and better biodiversity and how that impacts us,” Ramsing said.
Meatless Monday and the meat industry
Beyond journalism, one of the main reasons I started to practice Meatless Monday was for health reasons. Preventative, that is. But then, I started reading about the effects that eating a single piece of meat has on the environment. And the rest followed.
But what does that mean? It’s a hard conversation to have. Beyond the water and the energy it takes to produce meat, there are the meat industry’s gases and emissions. The natural eye can’t see these gases, but they play a huge role in what we feel when we walk outside.
“So there are three greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change,” said Brent Kim, an assistant scientist at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future.
Those gases are carbon dioxide (CO2), methane and nitrous oxide, Kim said. All three play a pivotal role in impacting Earth’s climate.
CO2 is a gas we can’t avoid because we as humans inhale oxygen and exhale CO2. But much of it comes from the burning of fossil fuels, which greatly increases CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions, causing more heat to be trapped into the atmosphere.
Pound for pound, methane and nitrous oxide have a much more powerful warming effect on the planet, Kim said. But how does this relate back to meat?
Well, some animals release methane, specifically animals like cattle, sheep and goats. Those animals release methane with just a burp or a simple trip to the bathroom.
I know this sounds like children’s bathroom humor. But I swear that it is scientifically true. Each farm may have thousands of gassy cattle, all in one spot, releasing methane into the air daily. It adds up. But if we eat less meat, fewer cattle will be sacrificed for our daily habits.
“With Meatless Monday, we’re not asking people to completely overhaul their whole diet. It’s just a small change one day a week,” Kim said. “We’re not saying everyone needs to go vegan. But for climate change, there is an urgency to reduce the amount of meat we eat.”’
Should you give Meatless Monday a try?
From my personal experience, I say go for it and start small. This whole story began with me doing a health challenge.
It then turned into a story for everyone to learn about meat’s impact on the planet.
I do know that our diets are accustomed to what we were taught. And most of us have the same diets because we all grew up on the same practices.
Personally, it was tough even switching my lifestyle to Meatless Mondays. There’s jokes when you express your plans, there’s awkwardness, there’s doubt, sometimes even bitterness for changing up your lifestyle.
But I feel good that I am putting my health first. And it’s been great to try out new recipes and different types of fruits and vegetables that I thought I would never try in my life. It led me to conversations with so many great and intelligent people.
I even tried a vegan spot, I-tal Garden, a Black-owned restaurant here in New Orleans, right on the legendary North Claiborne Ave. I went there to interview the head chef and owner, Chef Ra. While I waited, I had to try the food.
My order was cauliflower wings and vegan macaroni and cheese, which with every bite made me realize that I just like food. If the taste is there then you have me as a fan.
That was actually my first time trying cauliflower in wing form, which I didn’t know existed then. I understand now, and it was delicious. It was fried in a batter like a wing, but the sauce made up for the texture difference you get in cauliflower.
The mac and cheese stated that it was vegan but I couldn’t tell. It tasted like your traditional macaroni and cheese made at home right in your kitchen.
It’s safe to say I enjoyed the vegan cuisine.
Eventually, I got a hold of Chef Ra in his busy restaurant. We sat down and I told him about Meatless Monday. He thought it was a great idea.
I also had to pick his brain on meat substitutes. “Set the tone for what you are already used to eating,” Chef Ra said. If you’re used to eating, let’s say, chicken, then try a mushroom instead. The textures are almost similar. Basically, get creative with your ideas.
“Two years ago, we didn’t have as many options. Whereas now it’s easier to go out and get healthy food,” Chef Ra said.
I took his advice and just started Googling recipes and meatless options. I started to find myself getting excited for Mondays.
This was a change in my life. I mean, who likes Mondays?
I’m still growing and looking forward to adding more meatless days to my week. By doing that, I’m also doing my part in reducing climate-change-causing emissions.
This story was produced as part of the Lede New Orleans Fellowship 2.0 reporting fellowship, with support from Internews’ Listening Post Collective and Earth Journalism Network programs.‘