I recently decided to join my coop’s food committee. I am obsessed with food, as it is, and also I slyly saw a chance to bring more vegetables and fruit to our daily meals. Short after, I presented my idea to the rest of the committee: introducing Meatless Mondays.
Meatless Monday is “an international movement to help people reduce their meat consumption by 15% to improve personal health and the health of the planet” (apparently ‘saving animals’ doesn’t sell well). Either way, Meatless Monday is starting to pop up everywhere, it is a great initiative and I want to bring it here.
About 100 people on average eat at this cafeteria every day. About 20 of us are vegetarians/vegans, so around 80 meals with some kind of meat or fish portion are prepared every day, from Monday to Friday, for dinner. That is a whole, whole lot of meat – if I’m ever in need of reassurance for my diet, popping my head into the freezer to see a few hundred pounds of beef or chicken chilling around sure helps. Either way, mathematically speaking, changing that one dinner to a plant-based meal creates the same result as having 16 people pass on the meat for all 5 dinners of the week; or even 5 full-time vegetarians, if you assume the average omnivore consumes some kind of meat product for 14 of the 21 main meals a week. I am normally not a fan of these kinds of statistics, but thinking of it that way gives you a perspective. In my opinion, it is always about reducing suffering, reducing consumption – not about making black & white choices. Therefore, I can appreciate that from my pov having 80 people choose a vegetarian dish one dinner a week can be more helpful than “converting” one or two people to full-time vegetarians (even though some people may disagree with me here).
Why am I telling you all of this now? Well, tomorrow is the AGM of our housing cooperative and I decided to use this opportunity to inform everyone of our campaign and to win some votes, even.
I am kind of nervous about giving the talk, but at the same time I am 100% convinced by this cause. I know it’ll improve our coop for the better. It would make me so happy to leave Kingston, knowing I’ve left some positive change behind. This gives me extra motivation to push harder and harder towards that goal.
The actual decision will be made, based of feedback from a member survey next week. Fingers crossed.
vegansmarties 