Hospital and Universities Latest to Adopt Meatless Monday

If Meatless Monday hasn't come your way yet, it may not be too long before you start wondering, "where's the beef?" The national campaign gained traction when the Baltimore Public School System offered vegetarian options to students on Mondays. More and more institutions, organizations, media companies and celebrities have since vowed to eat no meat on Monday.

The latest campaign adopter is the Cornerstone Cafe, the main cafeteria at Johns Hopkins Hospital Wellness Corner. It seems like an overdue arrival since the Meatless Monday campaign was started in 2003 by Hopkins' Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future. Better late than never, right! Besides, being tolerant and taking small steps is the mentality of the campaign. It's not about being forceful and telling people that eating meat is wrong. It's about educating yourself to the ill-effects massive meat production and consumption have on the environment and our bodies, and then simply making a change one day a week in order to make a much larger effect on the whole.

In addition to the hospital, a handful of universities have joined in on the action. March 1, The University of California, Santa Barbara began a Monday ritual of removing beef from all of its cafeterias and all meat from one cafeteria. The University of Central Florida has begun providing incentives to students who go meat-free on Monday, including discounts and free drinks. Numerous colleges at Oxford University have followed Sir Paul McCartney's meatless footsteps. The University of Maryland will be following the trail led by the city's public school system by emphasizing vegetarian options on the cafeteria menus. While the University of California, Davis has a goal of converting 1,000 students and employees to forgo flesh on the first day of the week.

Taking the initiative to a larger scale, the city of San Francisco has become the country's first Meatless Monday city. The city's Board of Supervisors passed a resolution to support the movement and encourage schools, restaurants, and residents to take part.

While San Fransisco is the first in the US to make it a city-wide initiative, it is not the first ever. That title belongs to the city of Ghent, Belgium.

Photo by limonada via Flickr.