This week’s Goop is good one! Which is nice, because the last several Goops have been sucking, almost as if Gwyneth Paltrow was too constipated to write something interesting. Anyway, this week’s Goop is a “Make” and Gwyneth gets Paul McCartney to write it! And he even included a really nice photo of himself and his two (older) daughters, Mary and Stella (below). The whole thing is about getting people to sign on for “Meat Free Mondays” – all for health reasons, environmental reasons, and animal-cruelty reasons, I think. The complete Goop newsletter will be online in a little bit (I get the newsletter in my email, because I’m special), so here’s the Goop site, and here are some of the highlights:

I am not a vegetarian, but when I heard about “Meat Free Monday,” I was intrigued. I had never thought about the environmental impact of raising livestock. Below are the facts presented by Paul McCartney, our favorite vegetarian cookbooks, and a meat free dinner recipe from Mr. Chow to get us off to a good start.
Love, Gwyneth

From Paul McCartney:
my family and I launched Meat Free Monday in the UK, an idea which has been gaining support from people like Tom Parker-Bowles who, after a lifetime of denigrating vegetarians, recently wrote in his Daily Mail column, “I wince at the memory of my boorish antics” and who pronounced himself “intrigued”. Another supporter is Al Gore who stated that initiatives like Meat Free Monday “represent a responsible and welcome component of a comprehensive strategy for reducing global warming pollution and simultaneously improving human health.”

Even a number of schools have already done this in the UK with great success. The town of Ghent in Belgium has a meat free day and, amazingly, Sao Paulo has one even though Brazil is a large exporter of meat. In Sweden, the government is now labeling food to give the consumer the opportunity to understand the dangers of indiscriminate food consumption and there are many more examples appearing online.

The point is that so many people these days are looking for ways to “do their bit” for the environment. We recycle – something we never would have dreamt of doing in the past. Many people now drive hybrid cars but most people understand that we cannot leave this important issue to the politicians of the world. Recently, at the Copenhagen Conference for Climate Change, this issue was not even on the agenda and so I believe it is once again left to us, the people, to do it ourselves.

It’s amazingly easy to take one day in your week, Monday or any other day, and not eat meat. When you think about it, there are so many great alternatives, for instance, in Italian cooking, so many of the dishes are vegetarian already and Thai and Chinese cuisine are the same. All it means is that you have to think a bit about what you’ll eat that day but, in actual fact, far from being a chore, it’s a fun challenge.

Having been a vegetarian for over 30 years, I find it very simple and in fact, tasty and most enjoyable.

So there it is! Next Monday – don’t eat meat and do your bit to save this beautiful planet of ours. For more information, ideas and lots of meat free recipes, go to the official Meat Free Monday website.

Thanks Goopsters! Thanks Gwyneth!
Rock on ya’ll!

Paul

[From Goop]

I kind of like this idea. It’s not arrogant or mean, it’s just like, “Hey, just try it, it may work out.” As opposed to “Vegetarians are the best, meat-eaters are the devil.” The vegetarian recipes included are kind of funny, though. Goopy shares a recipe for “vegetarian fried rice”. Which, you know, is just fried rice. You don’t have to call it “vegetarian”. If it had meat in it, it would be “pork fried rice” or “chicken fried rice”. Mmm… pork fried rice. Meaty Thursdays.