The Red, White, and Green

[Watch video on TED.com]

If, like me, you’ve been participating in Meatless Mondays for some time now, you might be looking to push the envelope a bit further, since of all the things you can personally do to help the environment, reducing your meat consumption is perhaps the most effective: Eighteen percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions come from the livestock industry. That’s more than cars, trains, and planes combined, by the way.

So what about becoming a ‘weekday vegetarian,’ a la TreeHugger‘s Graham Hill? His conscientious compromise was profiled last week in Time magazine, and I have to admit that before reading the article, the thought had never occurred to me. (Though Hill had discussed his recent lifestyle change at the TED Conference in February; see video, above.)

The only potential problem I could foresee is the same one that happens to weekday dieters: You spend all week feeling so deprived that Saturday marks the commencement of a 48-hour cheesesteak and rib-eye binge. (Although I will say that a) a well-planned vegetarian diet doesn’t have to be synonymous with starvation; and b) the times that I’ve gone long stretches with eating very little meat, I usually feel so “clean” and healthy that I either stop craving meat altogether or only need a little taste to satiate my appetite.)

Have you tried the weekday veg approach? If so, do you notice a difference in the way you feel during the week versus the weekends?

–Jennifer Grayson

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