Meatless Mondays, a movement that has legs

[flvegan]

It's probably no surprise that Sir Paul McCartney, a longtime vegetarian, banned all meat from staff meals on his current world tour. But when Mario Batali starts to push people to eat their vegetables, you know something is happening.

The famously rotund and infamously gluttonous chef-restaurateur is to pig what the Beatles are to rock-and-roll. Batali, a rock-star chef if there ever was one, has changed the way Americans eat pork, introducing us to cured lonza, guanciale and lardo, which he once described to the New Yorker magazine as "the best song sung in the key of pig."

And yet this month, Batali announced that he would join the Meatless Monday campaign, a movement backed by a broad array of public-health advocates, animal welfare activists and environmentalists that asks carnivores to give up meat one day a week. Each of Batali's 14 restaurants, which include the meatily named Bar Jamon in New York and Carnevino in Las Vegas, offers two vegetarian entrees on Mondays, highlighted with an "MM" logo.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/18/AR2010051800891.html

An article worth reading (only doing the first three paragraphs, per DU's rules...but go read it). If you get the "by subscription only" page, Google "meatless monday" and click "News" and it'll be on top. That's what I had to do.

This graphic kind of sucks. Red meat is down, but overall consumption of land animal flesh is up overall.

[Robeson]

1. Excuse me a minute....

...O.K, I'm better now. I had to pick myself up off the floor to hear that Mario wasn't - every second of the day - going to promote eating a dead animal, and actually promote eating veggies. AND he's lost 45 lbs.!

He'll probably get kicked off the Food Channel for that fopaux.

[Codeine]

2. He'll pack enough cheese and egg in

to each meatless dish to more than make up for any positive impact that might have resulted.