Not ready to go vegetarian or vegan? You can still help the environment and animals by just reducing your meat and seafood consumption even a little bit!
Meatless Mondays is a fantastic global movement founded in 2003 to help people reduce their meat consumption by 15% to improve both personal health and the health of the planet that has continued to grow every year. Participating in Meatless Mondays means picking one day a week(and it doesn't have to be Monday!) to eat vegetarian, cutting out meat and seafood and perhaps even vegan by avoiding dairy products and eggs. Some use Meatless Mondays as a way to begin the transition into a fully or mostly vegetarian diet, while others are content to continue doing the once-a-week vegetarian thing forever. Over 50% of Americans are familiar with the concept and 1 in 5 are already doing it. I myself began by eating meat products only 1-3 times per week for a couple years, then eventually took the plunge toward full-time lacto-ovo vegetarianism.
How does Meatless Monday help?:
*If the world reduced meat consumption 15%, it would have the same impact on greenhouse gas emissions as taking 240 million cars off the road each year
*For every burger skipped, you save enough water to wash your car 15 times
*For every burger skipped, you save enough energy to charge your Iphone for 4.5 years
*For every burger skipped, you can save enough water to shower with for the next 2.5 months
*You can do more for the planet by going meatless on Mondays than by switching to a totally local diet
*On average, about 40 calories of fossil fuel energy go into every calorie of beef in the U.S., compared to 2.2 calories for vegetable protein
*Each day you leave meat off your plate, you can reduce your carbon footprint by over 8 pounds