Word: meatlessness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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PROFESSOR JEAN MAYER'S proposal to institute meatless days at Harvard deserves serious consideration. Eating meat is the most inefficient method of obtaining calories, since it takes about eight pounds of grain to produce one pound of meat. The world's grain reserves are at a dangerously low level, and the average American--who now consumes over twice as much beef as in 1950--is helping to deplete them even further...
Proponents of the meatless-days plan emphasize the importance of educating students about nutrition. Mayer cautions against rushing into anything, saying that "it is much more important for people to understand why they should not eat meat." And Frank J. Weissbecker, director of the Food Services, points out that if the plan is simply imposed on students who have no real understanding of the purposes behind it, "it'll be too bad if they just run off to McDonald's and swell that 15-billion figure...
...would be more consistent with the policies of this university to make various options available and to improve the level of education, rather than mandating a change to meatless days," she says. "Students here will one day be in the food industry, on boards of health, and they'll be heads of families. They should be educated consumers." Shore sees a growing interest in nutrition among students and is considering a number of ways to spread that interest even further--including showing educational videotapes on the subject to students in the University Health Services waiting room...
...students are concerned about the world food situation. But there is a difference between passing up one meal and making a fundamental change in eating habits, and it is not yet clear how far students are willing to go. Even if they are ready to take the step to meatless days, the plan is not an automatic solution to the food crisis. There remain the enormous problems of transporting grain from rich countries to poor countries and of slowing the rate of world population growth, which threatens to outstrip the available food supply...
...Mayer says that these problems are not insurmountable, and he is optimistic about what his proposal can achieve. "With meatless days, we will be accomplishing a number of things," he says. "We will be making a real contribution to relieving the pressure on our food supply; we will be keeping people from starving, until they can develop agricultural techniques and methods of population control; we will be improving our health; and we will be improving the state of our pocketbook. Also, we will just be paying attention to people who have problems that are much greater than any that...