Meatless Mondays with Chef Kim O’Donnel

This post is the first in a series which will be followed for the next three weeks with recipes posted every Saturday from Kim’s new book The Meatlover’s Meatless Cookbook. If you have any questions for Kim about green cooking, recipes, or the Meatless Monday campaign please add them below and we’ll include them in a follow-up interview to be posted at the end of the series. Let’s get cooking!

Kim O’Donnel is a pioneer, one of first writers to regularly feature vegetarian dishes when she began her career as a writer for the Washington Post years ago. She embraced the Meatless Mondays movement begun in 2003 and has been promoting the movement through her writing ever since. Kim has given talks everywhere from Politics and Prose to The American Culinary Institute. She’s even helping launch the first Meatless Mondays program in Seattle (where she currently resides) on November 29th of this year. Most recently, Kim has been tapped to write a new bimonthly health column for USA Today.

What exactly is the Meatless Monday Campaign?

Meatless Monday is a New York-based nonprofit initiative in partnership with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. It started back in 2003 as a way to encourage Americans to reduce their saturated fat intake by 15 percent. The gist: Take one day off from meat for your health – and more recently, for the environment.

Seven years later, this fledgling nonprofit has become a movement of major proportions, with supporters that include Mario Batali, Baltimore City Public Schools, Gwyneth Paltrow and Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

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Marcal’s big leap with Small Steps – show 27

Did you know 98% of household paper goods are still made by cutting down trees. That means your paper towels, your paper napkins, your toilet paper. All of these are made from 98% virgin fiber from freshly killed trees!. It’s a shame in today’s world of environmental advances that these kind of practices are still taking place. But they are. And it’s time we get informed, women. We make the majority of purchases in the household. We can turn that all around by just not buying into those products.

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To GREEN or not to GREEN, that is the question.

Luckily for us all, there is only one answer. That answer is yes. A better question might be, “Who can you trust?” In this ever growing and rapidly changing “green” market, it is harder and harder to figure out who or what is actually green. With so many words being thrown at us daily, ranging from “green”, “biodegradable”, “non toxic”, and many more, it is close to impossible to find out what truly is green.

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