Meatless Mondays, T-Bone Tuesdays?

We can, once again, blame the concept of sin. Abstinence from meat on Friday, once part of Catholic dogma, was considered a weekly penance (and failure to abstain became a further sin). But let's just say the Popes had it right all along: abstaining from meat once a week or so is actually a pretty good thing, they just got the day wrong.

In 2003, the public health docs at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore came up with the snappy notion of Meatless Mondays. Here was something anyone could do, Catholic and Protestant, Muslim or Jew, without resorting to Scripture, with astonishing effect. Nothing else, no other action or government or individual action, would do as much for the planet. You didn't have to turn down the thermostat, you didn't have to give up your gas-guzzling car, you didn't have to become a pain-in-the-butt vegetarian. All you had to do, once a week, was not eat meat, the msot resource-intensive food on earth.

(What a massive carbon footprint! America's voracious appetite for meat, currently at 70 billion pounds a year, takes an enormous toll on natural resources: half of all U.S. crop land -- 149 million acres -- is used for growing cattle and livestock feed, which, in turn, requires roughly 17 billion pounds of nitrogen fertilizer. When combined with soil, the resulting nitrous oxide is a greenhouse gas that is 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Yikes!)

Bang, 15 percent less meat consumption, 15 percent less demand for meat, and you could do it without having to endure high-horse moralizing from the vegan crowd (in France, they eat horses, you know).

Which brings us, belatedly, to Seattle resident Kim O'Donnel, one-time journalist for the Washington Post, and her book, The Meatlover's Meatless Cookbook. (Buy it here.) What I liked about this book is that it's not a vegetarian screed. Also terrific photos by local blogger Myra Kohn.

There are other points of view, to be sure. A chef in downtown Los Angeles has created a bacon-wrapped matzoh ball. (Unorthodoz, yes, but tt's okay, he's actually Jewish.) Ah, but the greenhouse gases from sizzling bacon are so rapturous!