Los Angeles City Council Embraces ‘Meatless Mondays’ Campaign

Nov 12, 2012

Who’s Defining Who? Animal Agriculture Being Defined by Meatless Monday Campaign Needs to Wake Up and Define Themselves

The global ‘Meatless Mondays’ campaign is gaining momentum that’s symbolic in nature as Los Angeles City Council passed a resolution to declare all Monday’s going forward to be meatless. The resolution won’t include law enforcement measures, but it’s meant to encourage residents not to eat meat once a week.

The controversial campaign seeks to reduce meat consumption for what they are calling health and environmental reasons. The Meatless Monday’s initiative is organized by a non-profit group that works with the Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health. The campaign has support groups around the globe that seek to push their agenda of weekly vegetarianism to achieve their cause of improved health, sustainability and mitigating climate change. While their message is controversial in nature, it’s been fairly successful - all at the expense of public perceptions about animal agriculture.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) released a controversial internal employee newsletter encouraging Meatless Monday’s – which they later retracted saying that the newsletter was released without proper approval. This action caused a firestorm in the agriculture world, especially those involved in animal agriculture. While any future promotion of this campaign has been put to a stop by the USDA, this one example highlights some of the success of the campaign and how the champions of vegetarianism have been very good at defining animal agriculture before they have even had a chance to define themselves.

When I talk about who’s defining who, I am talking about whom or what side is winning the public relations battle. The Meatless Monday campaign has done a good job attempting to link animal agriculture to larger social issues such as obesity, diabetes and greenhouse gas emissions. While these claims may not represent the whole truth, their message is resonating as with the example of the USDA and now the Los Angeles City Council. Now more than ever, it’s crucial those involved in agriculture and more specifically animal agriculture production to debunk some of this misconceptions, reveal the whole truth, and stop playing defense.

Video: Evolution of Beef Cattle Farming

The Clear Conversations podcast took to the road for a special episode recorded in Nashville during CattleCon, bringing listeners straight into the heart of the cattle industry. Host Tracy Sellers welcomed rancher Steve Wooten of Beatty Canyon Ranch in Colorado for a wide-ranging discussion that blended family history and sustainability, particularly as it relates to the future of beef production.

Sustainability emerged as a central theme of the conversation, a word that Wooten acknowledges can mean very different things depending on who you ask. For him, sustainability starts with the soil. Healthy soil produces healthy grass, which supports efficient cattle capable of producing year after year with minimal external inputs. It’s an approach that equally considers vegetation, animal efficiency, and long-term profitability.

That philosophy aligned naturally with Wooten’s involvement in the U.S. Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, where he served as a representative for the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association. The roundtable brings together the entire beef supply chain—from producers to retailers—along with universities, NGOs, and allied industries. Its goal is not regulation, Wooten emphasized, but collaboration, shared learning, and continuous improvement.