'Weekday Veg' Brings One Simple Rule to Sustainable Meat Eating

With meat-eating increasingly under the microscope as a contributor to carbon emissions and diet-related diseases, conversation about the ecological and health benefits of vegetarianism has heated up lately.

A lot of the debate focuses on meat eating as an all-or-nothing proposition, but more subtlety is possible and, some say, necessary to make any meaningful change in this area.

Graham Hill, founder of the environmental Website Treehugger, last week spoke about his idea of "Weekday Veg," a middle-ground between vegetarianism and meat-eating, at the Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) conference in Long Beach, California.

What's involved? "Follow this one simple rule: Save your meat-eating for the weekend," he writes in an article on the topic. Of course there are the shades of gray in the issue of what kind of meat to eat, but getting people thinking along the lines of reducing how much meat they eat is a good first step.

Hill points out that settling on a middle way is a strategy much more likely to get committed meat-eaters to listen to the argument for mitigation. "To most people, meat tastes great. To ask them to go cold turkey (har, har) is a huge ask," he writes. "The vegetarian movement has focused on pushing a binary decision."

What do you think? Is weekday vegetarianism a good idea?

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