Ex-Presidents Day

Good morning. This is Mark Young, Meatless Monday Reporter, coming to you live from this Holiday Monday. Yes, I know it is actually "Labour Day" today, but because of all the hoopla surrounding Bill Clinton's meatless ways, I have re-dubbed it Ex-Presidents Day in his honour. One of the great reasons I mentioned for going meatless on Mondays, way back when we started this thing, was a positive impact on our health by reducing the amount of meat in our diets. As an example of this, I pointed you to the original CNN interview with Bill Clinton. 

Today, Bill Clinton has lost weight, is feeling much better and his doctors are telling him his numbers have improved. Dr. Sanjay Gupta has just posted a follow-up interview for CNN to let the ex-Prez tell his story and to ask us to consider a day when we will see "The Last Heart Attack." That would be a great day. When you consider that this condition is largely a voluntary one, which is due to lifestyle factors and not genetics and can be reversed through excellent diet, it makes these deaths all the more tragic. There is also an interesting related story on CNN.com to which I now direct your attention.

Meanwhile, Bill's buddy the ex-Vice-President Al Gore, was finally coming clean on something he should have mentioned long ago. This article in Politico confirms that he now admits the link between a "meat-intensive diet" and global warming. It's about time that the face of the environmental movement took ownership of one of the most obvious connections, something he never did during his entire tour with "An Inconvenient Truth," for which he took a lot of heat from environmental advocates. Maybe we can count Gore amongst our MM allies now!

Because even the staunchest of meat-loving chefs are coming out in favour of reducing the amount of meat we eat. For instance, the Guardian featured this great quote from famously meat-centric British chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, which I assure you is not a made-up name: "We need to eat more vegetables and less flesh because vegetables are the foods that do us the most good and our planet the least harm." BAM! That's your money quote right there. So succinct! You could forget the rest of the article if you just absorbed the substance of that one sentence. Don't, though. The article is a great read from an unlikely source, and the story was also picked up in Treehugger.

Which brings us to this week's recipe, a famously meat-centric Hungarian dish, which we are going to prepare using non-meat ingredients. I recommend using "Gardein Beefless Tips" but you can use the "President's Choice" version from Loblaw's or even just cut up pieces of your favourite veggie burger to keep it simple. This is one of the dishes that used to always make me groan as a kid that I have now come to appreciate later in life (see also "Ratatouille"). Thanks, Mom! 

Happy Ex-Presidents day!