Chicago's Health Commissioner: Go Veg!

I'm not a vegetarian (we raise our own totally free-range poultry, and buy milk for cheesemaking & drinking from local totally pastured goats), but I do feel that Americans eat too much meat, so a month to get in touch with all the other wonderful foods available to us is a fantastic idea for most of us.

The one suggestion I'd have to improve on this concept would be to do it in July, which is a month of more than plenty on this continent. We try to eat locally and be connected to our food sources, and since we don't live in California or Florida, January and February are the leanest months of all as far as the available selection of fresh foods. We're basically using up what we canned, froze, or stored during the harvesting months last year, and eating lots of fresh eggs from our silly hens. In most parts of the country, people without their own gardens or a really good source of produce would have to rely on out-of-season, long-distance transported food, and not a great selection of those.

Compare that to summer's bounty! My own family, with only a TINY garden (but access to a fantastic CSA program) had a very nearly meatless July last year. This was not by design, just something I noticed after the fact, since I'd food-blogged every day that month. Simply put, we had such an embarrassment of riches in produce falling in our laps, it was just simple and intuitive to eat from that supply. It was a month of purple-hull peas, cornbread, fried green tomatoes, beautiful salads, watermelon pickles and every kind of vegetable and fruit imaginable...and we never missed our meat.

It might be a fun blogging project for lots of people to try in July--a month, or even a week, meat-free, for us omnivores to broaden our horizons. But I think that July is definitely the time to do it!