A Green Monday, without fish or meat, "is not an ecological gadget"

A vegetarian plate.

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The actresses Cécile de France and Juliette Binoche, the navigator Isabelle Autissier, the animators Stéphane Bern and Flavie Flament, the Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard, the mathematician and deputy Cédric Villani… On January 2, 2019, the economist Nicolas Treich, research director at INRAE ​​(National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment), and Laurent Bègue-Shankland, professor of social psychology and member of the University Institute of France (IUF) had managed to bring together 500 personalities around a good and ambitious resolution: to do without meat and fish every Monday ...

The platform, which invited the French to do the same, had had some media success.

In early October, the two researchers are launching a second campaign around “Green Monday”.

And the stars this time around are legumes.

Nicolas Treich responds to

How did the idea of ​​a “green Monday” come about in France?

The approach is part of a more global movement launched some fifteen years ago in several countries, notably in the United States.

The idea is each time to push for the establishment of a meatless day in the week, most often on Monday but not always.

We noted with Laurent Bègue-Shankland that, to our knowledge, there was no similar initiative in France.

This is what drove us “green Monday” in France with some variations compared to what may exist abroad.

We already encourage people to eat neither meat nor fish in a day, when initiatives elsewhere often recommend simply not eating meat.

Another special feature is the involvement of media figures in the campaign.

Finally, in parallel with the media campaign, we have launched a website where people wishing to embark on the “Green Monday” process can register and thus benefit from a follow-up but also to participate in a national scientific study on food monitoring.

What conclusions do you draw from this first “green Monday” campaign?

Its impact is difficult to measure, simply because we lack data on the actual food consumption of the French.

We also know that eating habits are very stubborn, we do not change easily.

And initiatives like “Green Monday” are not encouraged by some powerful players, like the meat lobby.

However, we did a survey of 2,000 people representative of the French population, one month after the launch of “Green Monday”.

51.5% of those surveyed had heard of “Green Monday”, 10.5% said they had implemented it and 25.1% intended to do so.

It's still a survey to be handled with a grain of salt, but it's encouraging.

And then all the same, this first campaign at least had a significant impact with the resumption of “Green Monday” in university catering.

The 800 Crous de France encourage students to opt for a vegetarian menu every Monday.

Perhaps restaurants or company canteens are also involved.

We don't know that very well.

Why launch today a second communication campaign around “Green Monday”?

We had stopped this first campaign until the end of 2019 or so, telling ourselves that we will relaunch it in 2020. We do this because asking questions about our eating habits is not anecdotal for the environment.

It is not an ecological gadget.

In an article published on The Conversation, we tried to calculate what impact “Green Monday” would have if it was followed by all French people.

This leads to an estimate of around 100 kg of CO2 equivalent (CO2e) saved per person per year.

By multiplying by the number of adults in France, we obtain a total reduction of around 5 million tonnes of CO2 per year.

This is the equivalent of what is emitted by domestic air traffic in France [the domestic lines editor's note].

However, the environmental policies currently carried out relate relatively little to our food, much less for example than to transport.

However, the #EGalim law requires school catering - from kindergarten to high school - to offer at least one vegetarian menu per week since November 1st * ...

It is somewhat the emblematic measure of this #EGalim law.

This is indeed going in the right direction even if it is for the moment only an experiment carried out over two years.

We can still see that things are moving, there is something positive.

An example: the Ministry of Ecological Transition supports our second “Green Monday” campaign, its logo is on our posters in the metro.

But if we come back to the Egalim law, it remains overall a disappointment.

We know that the differences in ecological impacts are important from one food production to another, more precisely between animal products and plant products.

However, the Egalim law does not have strong measures that would allow us to regulate our food production and consumption when this must be the top priority.

For example, there is a carbon tax in France on fossil fuels [which increases the cost of fuel and gas and thus aims to modify consumer behavior].

One could have imagined a similar mechanism in food.

Agriculture still generates a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions.

And that's not its only environmental impact.

Agriculture also contributes to air pollution, notably via ammonia emissions, particularly those from livestock.

Why are you focusing on pulses this year?

This is one of the novelties of this second campaign.

The message of the first was above all to abstain from eating meat or fish every Monday, but then we were not offering vegetable alternatives to replace these animal proteins.

However, it seems important to us to think about substitutions, if only to prevent people from turning to ultra-processed products.

We have therefore chosen to focus on legumes [dried beans, broad beans, chickpeas, cowpeas, lentils, etc.], because they sort of tick all the boxes.

Sanitary already: legumes are rich in protein, fiber and complex carbohydrates.

They are also recommended by nutritional guides around the world.

But their production also has a lot from an ecological point of view, in particular because these plants capture nitrogen so well that there is no need to add synthetic fertilizers to them.

The report of the Eat-Lancet commission [published in January 2019 and which looked at what could be a diet that is both good for health and good for the planet, note], recommends a consumption of legumes of 75 grams per day, or about ten times more than currently in France.

This is the whole problem with us: our consumption of pulses has dropped considerably over the past century and is today one of the lowest in the world.

It would be good to rediscover them: there are succulent dishes based on lentils, white or red beans that have been too much forgotten in France.

This is also what this second “Green Monday” campaign aspires to: that the world of gastronomy reintroduce these legumes on our plates.

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