Meatless Mondays Campaign at Eckerd College

  By: Isabelle Santoro and Haleigh Rogers

    For our Climate Change Communication piece, we wanted to look directly at our College Campus and find ways in which we could make a direct impact. Initially, we were interested in the sea level rise plans for the future of Eckerd College, but we quickly concluded that the project was way bigger than we could do in our timeline. Thus, we decided to look into ways we can decrease our carbon footprint on campus.

    We adopted the Meatless Monday campaign; founded by SId Lerner in 2003. Meatless Monday is a movement that is practiced all over the globe. It’s an encouragement for people to reduce meat in their diet for personal health benefits as well as plant health. By participating in Meatless Monday, an average meal without meat saves approximately 8llbs of carbon emissions. We wanted to implement these practices on Eckerd’s campus taking into account the number of people on campus, along with the different needs that are present within the population. We thought that having a Meatless Monday once a month for only one meal would be a good way to begin reaching across the barriers. 
We started this process by reaching out to Bon Appetit’s general manager for Eckerd College, Duke Walsh. He was immediately interested in working with us on this campaign and told us that they have been thinking about implementing this again on campus. Mr. Walsh gave us some history of Meatless Mondays with Eckerd; it was attempted in 2008 and had a considerable amount of backlash from students and parents who ended up calling the school and complaining. The difference between then and now is that they were implementing Meatless Mondays every Monday, where we want to slowly integrate it into school culture once a month. Because of this previous attempt, Mr. Walsh had told us that he would do his best to persuade Dean Annarelli, the Dean of Students at Eckerd College. Since we anticipated an undesirable result from the Dean, we created a list of ideal practices to a bottom starting line. These went from having an entire campus being meatless to only one cafeteria participating, to only one station being meatless at both, and then one station being meatless at one cafe, and then the option of giving a station to promote without being meatless. The school gave us the okay for promoting a Meatless Monday with hopes it would succeed but due to the past controversy, they only allowed us the promotion of the plant-forward station. 
    After we had received the approval, we made flyers and hung them up around campus to spread the word. Mr. Walsh had given us many ideas on what the menu should look like at the Plant Forward station (the vegetarian station in the cafeteria), so we created our own meat-free menu to be served to students that day. As we considered the ways in which we would be communicating with the students, we took inspiration from Per Espen Stoknes's chapter on nudging. Nudging is the practice of offering solutions or simply alluding to solutions without forcing someone to make an immediate choice. It gives people the chance to decide for themselves while pushing in a direction. Stoknes explains that “nudges combine thinking and doing can turn cognitive dissonance around for good: If I do all these things–insulate, go solar, recycle–then the cause must be important” (Stoknes 130). We hoped that using nudging talk when speaking with people, it would plant a seed of thought. We also relied on ideas of social norms where people become influenced by others around them making the choice to join in the Meatless Monday lunch. The ideas of social norms come from the Cialdini and Jacobson journal speaking on the impacts that social norms have on climate change. 
    On the day of the Meatless Monday, May 9th, the Bon Appetit staff had set up a table for us in the cafeteria during the lunch rush so that we could talk to people about our initiative and ask them if they would consider not eating meat for lunch in order to reduce Eckerd’s carbon footprint. Many people were very hesitant to not eat meat because they hadn’t seen what else was available. Many people came up to us and said that they were already vegetarian or vegan. We had many staff members participate in our Meatless Monday and some people even came up to thank us for doing this and that they really appreciate our efforts. We also had a lot of people tell us that they wouldn’t consider not eating meat at all. It was a mixed review from students, but overall we had a lot of engagement.
The day after Meatless Monday, Mr. Walsh and the Bon Appetit staff were able to give us the numbers on how much less meat was eaten during lunch in the cafeteria. Mostly every station that served meat was down 20-25% less than usual which means that people did participate in our project and steered away from eating meat for that one meal. Looking at the carbon emissions (CO2e) emitted we used the CO2everything website. A single serving of chicken is 1.82 kg CO2e whereas beef is 15.5 kg CO2e. On a typical day, the cafe serves 80 pieces of chicken which are 145.6 kilograms of CO2e. During the Meatless Monday, they served 60 pieces of chicken which equal 109.2 kg CO2e, this is a 36.4 kg CO2e decrease. The serving of beef burgers is normally 40 (620 kg CO2e) and they served 30 beef burgers that Monday (465 kg CO2e). This created a decrease of 135 kg CO2e for beef burgers served. Mr. Walsh was pretty impressed and surprised with how many people actually participated. So much so that he would like to continue the program with us next year. 
In order to spread the word on the day of Meatless Monday, we posted a story on our Instagram of the flyers we had put up around campus showing that we were in front of the cafeteria promoting Meatless Monday and that people should come support. We were re-posted by EckerdLife (an Instagram account for everything that goes on at Eckerd). We also posted on the platform Yik Yak (which is very popular at our school) as a way to get more outreach and involvement with the student body. We received a lot of feedback and concern from students at Eckerd. Many people thought that since the Bon Appetit staff had already cooked and prepared the meat, it was a waste of food if people just refused to eat meat. Many people were also confused as to why the cafeteria was still serving meat if it was supposed to be a Meatless Monday. One person even suggested that if we really wanted to reduce Eckerd’s carbon footprint, we should instead protest the school for how much meat they buy and serve. We will take this feedback from students and use it in the future when critiquing the program.
In 2007, Bon Appetit launched its Low Carbon Diet program which resulted in reducing approximately 5 million pounds of carbon dioxide each month. They prioritize and promote plant-based proteins, source their products more locally, and refrain from buying air-transported fruits, vegetables, meats, and other produce. The unsold surplus of food that is not eaten at Eckerd gets donated to Feed St. Pete which is a local food pantry. 

    Due to the good results from only one lunch, we have been asked to continue the project in the future. Hopefully, by having this project continued, we will see more support for the student body on campus. We understand that there are many needs that need to be met, but by starting on a small basis of once a month with one meal we hope that students would either join us or eat at the other cafeteria options. Our goal for this project is to have complete Meatless Mondays implemented on campus. Although we do not have a definite timeline we do have a strong support system with the school as long as the numbers continue to grow.