If you’re craving a change in your daily fare, especially if you’re feeding a family, consider joining the Meatless Monday and Meat-Free Mondays movements. Here are tips for enjoying Meatless Monday meals, with inspiration for making easy, tasty plant-base meals.
Meat-free Mondays was launched by Paul McCartney and his daughters Stella and Mary in 2009 and is still going strong. This organization produced a short film, One Day a Week, to show how impactful it can be to go meatless even once a week to help mitigate climate change.
The ever-present question is how to get the whole family on board with enjoying plant-based meals. Raising my own two children first as vegetarians and then as vegans, and often hosting their friends for meals, it was always clear that most kids are more adventurous than their parents give them credit for.
The keys were keeping food simple, serving it in a welcoming setting, and offering choices. Some might call this pampering, but it’s actually quite empowering.
Hopefully, Meatless Mondays will inspire you to go meat-free for the rest of the week as well. Explore Great Reasons to Go Vegan if you need more inspiration to stay the course — for the earth, the animals, and your well-being!
Tips for Meatless Monday meals … and beyond
Convert familiar dishes to plant-based. Even if a child chooses to go vegetarian or vegan on his or her own, that’s no guarantee that they won’t be finicky. Plant-powered kids can be as picky their omnivore counterparts.
Start by introducing familiar dishes in plant-based versions. Regularly introduce and revisit a wide variety of natural foods and fresh produce without pressure or coersion.
Give kids choices, and teach them to make good decisions. This doesn’t mean letting them dictate meals. But seriously, put yourself in their shoes. What if, day after day, some authority figure made all of your meals and made you to eat them, whether you liked them or not? Give kids a role in the process of choosing good foods for meals.
Embrace teachable moments while shopping. At my local natural foods store, I regularly see a parent ask their child, “Do you think we should get some [broccoli, cherry tomatoes, baby carrots …]?”
It’s a teachable moment, and a way to familiarize kids with a variety of good-for-them foods. Farm markets are a fantastic setting to get kids to understand the connection between the foods we buy and the people who grow them.
Encourage kids to help with meal planning and preparation. Even the most stubborn eaters can be swayed by giving them some say in meal planning. Show them colorful photos of tasty dishes in books and on the web, and ask them to help plan, shop for, and prepare one meal a week.
If a child has helped plan and/or make a meal, their pride and sense of accomplishment will inspire better eating habits. If kids feel invested in the process, they’re more likely to enjoy the outcome.
Be inspired by restaurant favorites. If you’re stumped about where to start, consider: What does everyone in your family like when you go out to eat? Pizza, pasta, Chinese, burgers, tacos? There are so many ways to make plant-based veggie-filled versions of restaurant and take-out favorites at home.
Serve delicious vegan food! The best way to win your family over is to show them how delicious meatless meals can be. Soups, pasta dishes sandwiches, wraps, and potato dishes — not everything benefits from being meaty.
Most everyone loves pizza, lasagna, and chili, all of which are easy to make in plant-based versions. There’s much common ground in plant-based meals that can be shared pleasurably and peacefully.
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