Saturday, April 7, 2012

Growing a Movement

By Loudoun Veg founder, Sue Sedlazek


When I first met Shoes Cup & Cork Club owner Jane Shihadeh, I was a customer asking questions about the menu.  Specifically, I’d wanted to know if any of the entrees she offered were vegan.  That question opened up a conversation about menu choices and the challenge restaurants face in accommodating the expanding list of dietary options demanded by their patrons.  Gluten-free.  Nut-free.  Dairy-free.  Vegetarian.  Vegan.

I understood the tricky balancing act required of business women like Jane.  She genuinely wanted to satisfy her customers but also had to think about the economics of expanding her menu.   As we got to talking about what sorts of options might be available to someone with my dietary needs, we stumbled onto the topic of Meatless Mondays.  Jane lit up.  She was very familiar with the national campaign and loved the idea of doing something special for her veg customers one day a week.  Right then and there, we decided to team up and start a grassroots campaign to bring the Meatless Monday movement to Loudoun County.

As a former oncology nurse, Jane is quite knowledgeable about the link between diet and health.  The idea of helping people reduce their consumption of saturated fats by promoting healthy plant-based foods is a natural extension of her career as a caregiver.  The fact that the national Meatless Monday campaign is affiliated with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health reinforces her conviction.

Since becoming involved with the campaign, Jane has grown increasingly aware about some of the other reasons for cutting back on animal products besides the obvious benefit to personal health.  Reports about the devastating impact of animal agriculture on the environment were compelling.  Waterways contaminated by runoff from feed crops and animal waste containing toxins and antibiotics is particularly concerning given Virginia’s ranking as second among states with the most polluted rivers in the country.   There are also the emissions of greenhouse gases which rival those of the transportation industry.  And then there’s the considerable depletion of water and land, two of our planet’s most precious resources.  It quickly became clear that if we ever hoped to address the issue of world hunger, we needed to drastically curb our consumption of meat and dairy.

Being a compassionate person by nature, Jane was also moved by reports describing the egregious abuse of animals on factory farms.  While she wasn’t ready to join me in becoming a vegan, she has a strong appreciation for the reasons I became one.  Offering a vegan menu one day a week was something she could do to support the values we both shared around issues of health, environment and animal welfare.  She hoped others would feel the same way.

From the beginning, Jane was insistent that our Meatless Monday initiative be something easy for everyone to participate in.   Since most restaurants already offer some sort of vegetarian option, it wouldn’t take much to create a meatless special for one day of the week.  For patrons, Meatless Monday menus would simply offer them another choice, along with a good incentive to begin their weeks with a healthy, delicious meal.  And as Jane likes to point out, with all the benefits associated with it, who wouldn’t want to do it?

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