Meatless Mondays in Sedona

Target:

Sedona City Council

Sponsored by:

Sheron Foster

We, the undersigned, pledge to support the Meatless Mondays campaign by not eating meat on Mondays. We also encourage the Sedona City Council to pass the following resolution.

Resolution: Meatless Mondays in Sedona
WHEREAS, the City of Sedona strives to be a Green City that promotes lifestyles that are healthy and ecologically sustainable; and
WHEREAS, food and farming systems have significant impacts on our health and the ecological well-being of our planet; and
WHEREAS, there is increasing popular concern about the problems associated with industrialized animal agriculture, including environmental destruction, threats to consumer health and rural communities, and the treatment of animals; and
WHEREAS, the World Health Organization in 2002 reported "consistent... evidence that predominantly plant-based diets will prevent or delay a significant proportion of non-communicable chronic diseases"; and
WHEREAS, the American Dietetic Association has stated that vegetarians have "lower rates of death from ischemic heart disease, lower blood cholesterol levels, lower blood pressure, and lower rates of hypertension, type 2 diabetes, and prostate and colon cancer" and are less likely than meat-eaters to be obese; and
WHEREAS, the United Nations "Food and Agriculture Organization in 2006 cited raising animals for food as "one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global" and calculated meat's contribution to anthropogenic green house gas emissions alone at 18% (a 2009 Worldwatch Institute report by World Bank environmentalists recalculated meat and dairy's contribution to global warming and raised the figure to 51%); and
WHEREAS, animals raised for food in the US alone generate 130 times the waste of the human population, a staggering 89,000 pounds per second , helping to make animal agriculture the leading cause of pollution of our waterways; and
WHEREAS, foregoing animal products in the diet has the potential to alleviate and even eradicate world hunger and thirst, as raising animals for food occupies 70% of the world's available agricultural land, using 200 times the water and ten times the energy required to produce the equivalent amount of plant protein; and
WHEREAS, the Nobel Prize winning chair of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, has declared that the easiest way to reduce one's carbon footprint is to make one day a week meat-free; and
WHEREAS, the world renowned Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health launched the US's Meatless Monday campaign, for which the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future serves as scientific advisor; and
WHEREAS, school districts, restaurant chains, hospitals and other institutions worldwide have established weekly meat free days and, in recent months, San Francisco and Washington D.C. have declared Meatless Mondays and Meat Free Mondays respectively;
THEREFOR BE IT RESOLVED that Sedona City Council encourages individuals, institutions and businesses to provide and consume more plant-based foods, especially those grown locally and organically; and
RESOLVED that Sedona promotes expansions of the number of Farmers Markets, Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs, Community Gardens, and other venues for providing healthful plant-based foods, and encourages food retailers to offer more plant-sourced options; and
RESOLVED that the City of Sedona endorses the international Meatless Mondays campaign by encouraging citizens, each Monday, to forego consuming animal products and adopt a plant-sourced diet, so as to foster healthier people on a healthier planet, and that Mondays in Sedona are now to be recognized as "Meatless Mondays".