NYC Green Schools

In our quest to bring Meatless Mondays to more school cafeterias, we recently interviewed one of the people who’s helping to make that happen, Chris Elam.  Elam is the program director of Meatless Monday, an organization dedicated to getting the word out about the health and environmental effects of reducing meat consumption.

Here’s what Elam had to say about the benefits of going meatless, how schools are making the change, and why it would be a big deal if New York City schools signed on.

When did Meatless Monday start, and what is its mission?

In our quest to bring Meatless Mondays to more school cafeterias, we recently interviewed one of the people who’s helping to make that happen, Chris Elam.  Elam is the program director of Meatless Monday, an organization dedicated to getting the word out about the health and environmental effects of reducing meat consumption.

Here’s what Elam had to say about the benefits of going meatless, how schools are making the change, and why it would be a big deal if New York City schools signed on.

Meatless Monday, an initiative of the The Monday Campaigns, launched in 2003 in association with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Our mission is simple: to reduce saturated fat intake worldwide by encouraging people to cut meat one day a week. As a nonprofit public health initiative, we are dedicated to bringing Meatless Monday to homes, schools, campuses, offices and communities at large.

Why meatless?

A broad range of studies suggests that excessive meat consumption may result in higher risks of the four primary chronic preventable diseases killing Americans today: heart disease, cancer, diabetes and stroke.

Why Monday?

It’s the start of the week. Research shows that Monday is the very best time for people to start and sustain behavior change. Indeed, if this Monday passes you by, there’s always another one around the corner – allowing you to wipe the slate clean, and recommit to healthy behaviors. Plus, “Meatless Monday” just sounds right.

Tell us about the Baltimore City Public School System and how Meatless Monday got started there?

85,000 school kids in Baltimore now start each week with healthy, fresh, plant-based lunches – for some of these kids, sadly, it’s one of the few nutritious meals they receive all week. The Meatless Monday campaign works closely with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, located in Baltimore, and they were instrumental in outlining the health and environmental benefits – nudging the Baltimore school system to embrace Meatless Monday in September, 2009. In addition, Baltimore has a very forward-thinking food services director, Tony Geraci, who spearheaded the implementation, along with a push for more local produce in school cafeterias and more school gardens. It’s been a rousing success so far!

Are you working with other public school systems in the U.S?

Currently there are 4 schools in the East Village (of Manhattan) that have proudly implemented Meatless Monday. We are also working on a pilot program in Chatham, New Jersey. There are 8 schools in Covington County, Kentucky that go meatless on Monday. And with the recent announcement that the city of San Francisco has adopted Meatless Monday, we are targeting other west coast cities such as Los Angeles, San Diego, Seattle and Portland, reaching out to their city officials and school boards and encouraging them to join the movement.

What are your plans for the New York City public system? Are you speaking with anyone at the DOE Office of School Food about implementing Meatless Monday in our city’s schools?

Now with the active support of Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, we are speaking with Stephen O’Brien, Director of School Food, this week. Our plan is to show how easy, fun and healthy it is to bring Meatless Monday to all schools in New York City. Indeed, we are working with the New York Coalition for Healthy School Food to market school lunch recipes that they’ve developed – recipes that are plant-based while utilizing the federal government food allotment – to the city and to the rest of the country.

What would be the impact of the New York City Public School System going meatless on Monday?

The impact would be profound. For one, it would show the rest of the country that New York City can take a leadership role in kids health. Secondly, it would get kids thinking, it would get teachers developing new curricula, and most importantly, it would get parents reflecting on and hopefully improving the quality of the food their children eat. In the short term, it would provide nutritious and tasty lunches to our city’s youth at a time when the spector of childhood obesity looms ever larger.

Who’s joined Meatless Monday so far?

The coalition of civic leaders, food celebrities and taste makers is broad. Al Gore, Michael Pollan, Sir Paul McCartney, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Mollie Katzen, Katie Lee, Gwenyth Paltrow and Simon Cowell – these names touch on our range of support. Internationally, Meatless Monday programs have popped up in Britain, Brazil, Taiwan, Austalia, Canada, Holland and Finland. Here in this country, about 30 college campuses go meatless on Monday. Nearly 100 blogs do weekly Meatless Monday features, including the biggest one of all: Huffington Post. And Compass Group, the world’s largest food services company, says go meatless once a week in 8,500 U.S. corporate and academic cafeterias. The Meatless Monday movement continues to grow – and we hope to enlist New York City to further spark the engine.

Finally, what do you hope to achieve with Meatless Monday?

It’s all about raising consciousness. Helping inspire positive change, one small step at a time. My colleague, Tami O’Neill, wrote this recently, and I think it’s apt:

Is there anything more American than the chicken nugget? Quick, cheap, portable and deep fried, these golden morsels have become more synonymous with our culture than apple pie. More than a telling indication of our nation’s priorities, processed meats like hamburgers, hot dogs and chicken nuggets have become a way of life for many of us. Americans consume, on average, over 200 pounds of meat each year – fully 45% more than the USDA recommends.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We have an option. We can gradually improve the quality of the food we eat, the fuel we put in our tank. Our hope is that we can achieve this together, by making more space on the plate for vegetables, one Monday at a time!

When we joined the New York Public School system back in September and first took a look at our schools’ lunch menu, these were some of the meals we saw:  Chicken Nuggets, Sweet and Sour Pork, Hamburger, Mozzarella Sticks, Pizza.  We were struck that every meal on the menu was either meat or cheese based.  Animal protein, in the form of meat or cheese, is the main source of saturated fats, which raise the level of cholesterol in your blood thereby increasing your risk of heart disease.   We also knew that animal production for food consumption contributes more to global warming than all forms of transportation combined.  With 50% of children between the ages of 2-15 already having fatty streaks in their arteries (according to a study by The New England Journal of Medicine), what we saw was a menu that was making our children and planet sick.

Fortunately, our schools (The Children’s Workshop School, The East Village Community School and PS 94), which share the same cafeteria, already had a Wellness Committee, and so we joined.  When the parents on our committee voiced our concern about the preponderance of meat and cheese dishes to Shawn Chambers, our SchoolFood manager, and asked if we could have Meatless Mondays that would feature more plant-based meals, to our delight, he said yes.  We then received permission from the principals of our schools and, starting in October 2009, our schools were the first in New York City to have Meatless Mondays.

Since October, we’ve tried to expand the meals offered on Meatless Mondays and even had a taste test with our students to find out which plant-based meals they prefer.  This month our Meatless Mondays feature vegetarian chili with rice, black-bean burritos, African gumbo and veggie burgers with a side of beans.  All these meals are cooked with fresh ingredients in our school kitchen.  We are tremendously thankful to Shawn Chambers, our SchoolFood Manager, Marianny Abreu, our kitchen supervisor, and the dedicated cooks in our kitchen, without whom Meatless Mondays would not have been possible.

The Baltimore City Public School system, which serves 80,000 students a day, already participates in Meatless Mondays, joining an international movement of individuals, organizations and cities making the commitment to lower meat consumption and enjoy a plant-based diet on Monday.  Our desire is to see New York City become the next public school system to join this campaign, so that all the city’s children can enjoy the health benefits of eating plant-based meals.

We will soon be providing information for parents about how to get Meatless Mondays started at their schools.  In the meantime, if you’re a parent and would like to form a Wellness Committee at your school, click under “How to Improve Your School’s Food” to find out how to do so.  Our next post will feature an interview with Chris Elam of Meatless Mondays, whose organization is working in association with the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health to bring this health initiative to people throughout the world.

Last Thursday NY 1 and Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer visited our schools, The East Village Community School and the Children’s Workshop School, to speak about his plan to bring Meatless Mondays to all New York City Schools.  Our schools were the first in the city to have Meatless Mondays, which we’ve been enjoying since October, 2009.

Click here to watch us on NY 1 and find out why Meatless Mondays matter, and read Scott Stringer’s recently released blueprint for how to create a sustainable food system in our city.

Meatless Mondays is a campaign to have our children have more healthy food choices at lunch, but it’s also an environmental issue.  The most recent report on global warming and animal product consumption by the World Bank, Livestock and Climate Change: What if the Key Actors in Climate Change Are…Cows, Pigs and Chickens? released in November 2009, states that the production of animals and their products for food contributes 51% to global warming.  That’s more than all forms of transportation combined!  If we can stop 850,000 servings of meat once a week, we’ll be doing our part to make a difference.

Please join us in our campaign to have Meatless Mondays at all New York City schools. Form a nutrition committee, get in touch with your School Foods Manager, and with the permission of your principal, ask them to replace the meat dishes that are served with veggie burgers and bean burritos.  To get more details about how to do this, look under our category “How to Improve Your School’s Food.”  The more parents who take the initiative of enacting Meatless Mondays in their school, the better chance Scott Stringer has of making it a citywide policy.

Please join us on this very exciting campaign!