EAT AND ACT YOUR POLITICS - Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America - page 172

15
EAT AND ACT YOUR POLITICS
Every great movement must experience three stages: ridicule, discussion, adoption .
—John Stuart Mill (1806-73), British philosopher
Throughout history, social movements have played a powerful role in introducing new ideas, values, and
beliefs that lead to political change. Over the past fifty years, the civil rights, women's rights, and envir-
onmental movements have transformed American society, ultimately resulting in important regulatory and
legislative changes. The food movement—a decentralized and diverse phenomenon—is creating an import-
ant cultural shift by changing the way many Americans both eat and think about food. Awakening people to
the problems and dangers of the food system is the first step to political action.
One of the promising outcomes of this cultural shift is a decline in meat consumption. U.S. demand for
meat, particularly red meat, has declined for four years in a row and in five out of the last six years, ac-
cording to the trade newspaper the Daily Livestock Report . The Values Institute at DGWG, a social science
research company, recently predicted that the “flexitarian diet”—reducing the amount of meat eaten without
becoming a full vegetarian—is a major health trend. It ascribes this change in eating patterns to the Meatless
Monday initiative.
FGI Research confirmed in a 2011 study that 50 percent of Americans are aware of Meatless Monday and
that more than a quarter of those individuals have been influenced to cut back. What is stunning about this
is that the campaign has been a grassroots, word-of-mouth effort with no paid ads, media flacks, or public
service announcements.
Meatless Monday is the brainchild of retired advertising executive Sid Lerner, the developer of the “Don't
squeeze the Charmin” commercials. The advertising guru, with fifty years of advertising experience under
his belt, wanted to do something meaningful to reduce the health impacts of eating too much saturated fat, a
leading cause of heart disease. Lerner remembered the idea of Meatless Monday from his childhood, when
it was introduced by the federal government during World War II as a patriotic voluntary rationing effort.
Monday, the beginning of the new week, represents a common cultural experience.
Lerner, a charismatic and energetic eighty-year-old, teamed up with twenty public health schools to pro-
mote the idea of using Monday as a prompt to promote healthy habits. He knew intuitively what research
has now proven: that a weekly health routine beginning on the first day of the workweek reinforces good
behavior fifty-two times a year. Meatless Monday has taken off across the globe. And it's proven to be a first
step for many people to move on to political engagement.
Film, social media, and other forms of cultural expression are also playing an important role in engaging
people on food issues. Food, Inc ., the Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning film exposing the devastating
impacts of agribusiness, is one of the top twenty documentaries of all time, ranked as one of Amazon's top-
selling DVDs of a documentary film, and has nearly half a million Facebook fans. The Norman Lear Center