After weeks of investigation, the Animal Agriculture Alliance claims that the Meatless Monday campaign is misrepresenting the campaign’s enrollment and prevalence among schools, restaurants, hospitals and colleges.

In anticipation of the campaign’s 10th anniversary, the Alliance analyzed the overall effects of the campaign and gauged its effectiveness by individually surveying every participant listed on the Meatless Monday website. The Alliance found that the campaign has not been as popular as the movement claimed. Most notably:

• Out of the 56 K-12th grade schools listed as participating, 64.2 percent no longer or never participated in the program
• Out of the 155 colleges/universities listed as participating, more than 43.2 percent no longer or never participated in the program
• Out of the school districts listed as participating, more than 57 percent no longer do

The campaign also counts restaurants and food service providers among its allies, yet, more than 35 percent and 47 percent, respectively, no longer participate in the program.

“These results are truly astounding. When we started the project, we didn’t expect nearly as many organizations to not actually be participating in the program,” said Alliance President and CEO Kay Johnson Smith. “The Meatless Monday campaign tries to promote a reduction in meat, milk and egg consumption as trendy, but clearly it hasn’t taking off as strongly as they’d hoped.”

Schools, restaurants and food service providers also echoed these sentiments, noting that adoption of the campaign was widely unpopular, led to food waste, and elicited complaints from parents worried about proper nutrition.

At Monroe Elementary School in Utah, Lisa Larson told the Alliance that the students “didn’t like the choices they were given,” which apparently included peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and salads. April Young, a registered dietician with the Granite School District in Utah echoed these concerns, noting there was already a vegetarian option available in the local schools.

“We made a conscious decision to end the program after participating for a little under two years,” Young said. “As a dietician I plan meals to accommodate students. Many students have their own dietary needs and those should be handled individually — not as part of a large-scale program.”

Many of those interviewed by the Alliance maintained that they didn’t understand how they appeared on the campaign’s website in the first place.

Meatless Monday is a campaign that seeks to eliminate meat from Americans’ meals seven days a week, beginning with Mondays. Organized through the Center for a Livable Future at John Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, the campaign, which is funded in large part by wealthy, long-time animal rights activists Sid and Helaine Lerner, pushes an extreme animal rights and environmental agenda by promoting false claims about animal agriculture.

“Offering options is always better than alienating consumers by forcing a viewpoint —and diet — upon them,”said Johnson Smith. "At the Alliance we support consumer choice. People don't like to be forced to do anything. If the Meatless Monday campaign was honest — they would see that their numbers are dwindling and that their extreme viewpoint will ultimately lead to the campaign’s demise.” PD

—From Animal Agriculture Alliance news release