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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