The Board of Supervisors of the city of San Francisco has voted to make Mondays vegetarian throughout the city.  Their initiative encourages San Franciscans to give vegetarian meals a try, and encourages restaurants and stores to make an extra effort to offer vegetarian items on the menu.

I find it interesting to contrast this with Earth Hour, which happened last month.  For Earth Hour, in order to save natural resources, everyone turns out their lights and sits in the dark.  This is a nifty idea, and an interesting observance to remind us to reflect upon ecological themes.  But I think we can all agree that it is not a sustainable lifestyle.  

(And as an outspoken atheist, I find that Earth Hour has a strange whiff of the Orthodox Jewish tradition of the Sabbath, which I find utterly absurd.  There is a magic man in the sky who cares whether or not your refrigerator's motor kicks in on one particular day of the week.  Suuuuuure there is.)

Worse, Earth Hour serves only to push both sides of the debate farther apart.  People who are on the fence about ecological issues are completely turned off by the idea of Earth Hour.  To some people it seems emblematic of the modern ecological movement, urging people to sit in the dark.  It is rife for mockery, and indeed from the outside I can see how you might get the impression that the only thing you get out of Earth Hour is smugness.

By contrast, Meat Free Mondays are all about "try it, you might like it."  Furthermore, it's completely feasible for people to go an entire day without eating meat.  Unlike another ecological observance, Buy Nothing Day, where you just shift your buying to the day after, no one is going to have to make up their meat consumption the next day.

In fact, if the entire country observed Meat Free Monday, we would be in a much better place, both health wise and ecologically speaking.  Cutting America's meat consumption by 1/7th would make a dramatic improvement across the board.  And I think it's important that we keep that message front and center: you don't have to give up your favorite meat meal, whatever it may be.  But just like you wouldn't eat cake for every meal, you don't have to eat meat at any meal either.  

Meat Free Mondays are all about encouraging people, rather than the somewhat finger-wagging tone of Earth Hour.  When people find out that I'm vegetarian, I often get questions like, "But what do you eat?"  A lot of people are apparently unable to imagine a vegetarian meal beyond "salad."  If restaurants offered more vegetarian options, and encouraged people to try them, I think a lot of folks would be surprised at the vast array of meals they can enjoy without the cruelty or severe ecological impact of meat eating.

And of course, vegetarianism - even just for one day a week - comes with its own smug bonus on the back end.

Creative Commons-licensed image courtesy of Flickr user SP8254