#MoveTheDate
1.8
Days
Eliminating meat consumption one day per week would move Earth Overshoot Day by 1.8 days.
What is the solution?
Participating in ‘Meatless Mondays’, which involves adopting a vegetarian diet for one day a week.
This solution improves our resource security in the food category.
How does it #MoveTheDate?
Meat production, especially beef production, is incredibly resource intensive. It requires more energy, space, and feed per calorie than plant-based foods. Producing one kg of grain-fed beef may require up to 25 kg of grain and roughly 15,000 liters of water.
How is it scalable?
Animal products, including meat, represent a large portion of the caloric intake of high-income populations. There is ample opportunity to reduce the animal-based proportion of diets in high-income countries.
What is the solution?
Participating in ‘Meatless Mondays’, which involves adopting a vegetarian diet for one day a week.
This solution improves our resource security in the food category.
How does it #MoveTheDate?
Meat production, especially beef production, is incredibly resource intensive. It requires more energy, space, and feed per calorie than plant-based foods. Producing one kg of grain-fed beef may require up to 25 kg of grain and roughly 15,000 liters of water.
How is it scalable?
Animal products, including meat, represent a large portion of the caloric intake of high-income populations. There is ample opportunity to reduce the animal-based proportion of diets in high-income countries.
Meatless Mondays is a playful strategy for providing people with opportunities to try out meatless diets. If done effectively, it may attract new interest in changing eating habits, and run into fewer identity clashes. For instance, psychologists have observed that promoting sustainable diets using moralized labels and identities decreases the desire to follow meat-free diets. But when using labels such as ‘plant-based’, this resistance is less present as it does not point to an identity conflict. It’s just a product label. Invitational approaches that allow people to experiment with something new rather than scolding them, may have positive effects that go beyond a weekly day of meatless meals.
Learn more about Food-based solutions here.
Global Footprint Network gratefully acknowledges the generous support of Avina Stiftung for Earth Overshoot Day in general and the food dimension in particular.
There’s no benefit in waiting!
Acting now puts you at a strategic advantage in a world increasingly defined by ecological overshoot. Countless solutions exist that #MoveTheDate. They’re creative, economically viable, and ready to deploy at scale. With them, we can make ourselves more resilient and #MoveTheDate of Earth Overshoot Day. If we move the date 6 days each year, humanity can be out of overshoot before 2050.