The current official Catholic position on not eating meat on Fridays is that it is encouraged but not required - which appears to be essentially the same position the Los Angeles City Council has.
Public health advisories are best left to the … Health People. Doctors and other medical associations.
I find it odd that a city council of such a major city would wade into this. It’s really not a function of city government.
FWIW I cut back on meats years ago by reducing portion size. Gone are the days of 14 oz steaks at one meal. I still get the steak occasionally but I take half of it home for another night.
How you figure? City and state governments sponsor all kinds of public health campaigns. For example, in my city the “iChoose 600” (reducing obesity by ordering meals of 600 calories or less) is all over local billboards and whatnot. There are “don’t drink and drive” ad campaigns, “drink fewer sugary drinks” ad campaigns, “don’t smoke around your kids” ad campaigns, you name it.
I fail to see why this shouldn’t be considered “a function of city government”. City governments have access to a lot of ad space that catches the eye of local residents (posters at bus stops, for example). The health recommendations they make are pretty obvious and noncontroversial, but they’re messages that a lot of people might not see without some local ads. So why shouldn’t the city put up some local ads?
Is the “Meatless Monday” recommendation seen as somehow more edgy or controversial than “don’t smoke around your kids”? AFAICT it’s really not, although maybe some posters are feeling uncomfortable with the gimmick of naming one particular “official” weekday for cutting down meat. If the ads just said “Try eating less meat” they might not find it so threatening.
IIRC, fast food joints use 85% lean (15% fat) hamburger meat because fat, while delicious, is messy. Fry a 70% lean burger and an 85% lean burger at home and see which one you want to clean up after, then imagine cleaning up WHILE frying billions and billions of them every year.
Then tell yourself that the 85% one tastes better. 
Ah, but what about Catholics who refuse to acknowledge the Vatican II reforms? We know there’s at least one in LA.
Not anymore. He had to excommunicate himself when he got divorced.
This is true for any food though, and I can’t imagine eating a 14 ounce steak in one meal, just because it is really way to much to eat by itself, both in terms of size and calories (plus whatever else you eat with it). The most meat I usually eat at once is is around 4 ounces; for example, I just had a can of tuna as a high-protein snack (100 calories and 22 grams of protein, very few “real” foods can approach those levels of protein/calorie). Or perhaps a single hamburger with a 4-ounce patty (cooked at home on a whole-wheat bun).
Actually, when I think of it, I eat less meat than the average American* even if I eat it almost every day, even though I also eat a relatively high protein diet (around 100 grams a day), but around 40 grams of that (average) comes from milk, especially on days when I work out.
*Now that I looked it up, maybe they DO eat too much, 270 pounds per year, or almost an entire 14-ounce steak every day (of course, they eat too much food in general), but reduced portion size is a better way than skipping days.
Wow, who could have guessed that a bunch of Democrats would try to engage in social engineering? I for one am shocked.
Seriously, as another vegetarian, I think this is a great thing. Maybe it will get some people to open their minds and try some foods they wouldn’t otherwise try. Having a decent meal without meat isn’t as hard as a lot of people think it is. Millions of people in India manage it.
If you want to get upset about the nanny state or government infringing on civil liberties, there are tons of other far more serious things to get worked up over.
Shifting one day per week’s worth of calories away from beef and dairy does more to lessen greenhouse gas emission than buying all locally sourced food. (Freaknomics guys cite).
Forget about the health aspect and it’s still a solid idea if you care about global warming, etc.
Yeah its ridiculous to think that any city would do something as nanny-like as banning meat on Mondays or telling you what size drink you can have.
As others have pointed out, it’s just a public health campaign.
There’s pretty good evidence that just giving people information about what is good or bad for them doesn’t work very well.
Asking them to commit to something, especially in a public way, works better.
So instead of complaining about the nanny state, people should be encouraged that the city council is not simply investing money in another pointless round of “This is your brain on beef” ads.
Neither of those things is happening. The NYC “super size sugar soda ban” isn’t “telling you what size drink you can have”; rather, it’s simply limiting the maximum size of certain types of drinks that a restaurant or other eatery is allowed to sell.
You can sit in your home or in a public park with a two-gallon jug of sugared soda drinking it to the last drop with a curly-whirly straw, and the law won’t have a thing to say against it. Nope, “what size drink you can have” is still entirely up to you, as long as you’re the one making the drink.
Just like the city isn’t going to tell you how often you have to wash your knives and sterilize your cutting boards, but they are going to impose such rules on restaurants and other eateries. Because commercial establishments have to follow certain intrusive and bossy rules in the interests of public health doesn’t mean that individual liberties are somehow being weakened by “nannying”.
And of course, a mere promotional campaign like “Meatless Mondays” isn’t imposing any rules at all on anybody.
And the real problem is population; we could all eat a paleolithic diet, what humans evolved on, if we didn’t have 7 billion people (same for almost every other example of humans degrading the environment), but of course nobody is going to try to address that, even indirectly (well, China has tried).
Also of interest, the methane from cows, even if they ate grass (no GHGs from growing crops)? Well, bison and deer produce methane too, so much that total methane emissions were almost as high as the current U.S. cattle herd* (which as I posted is about the same size as 60 years ago, so that isn’t causing recent global warming, remember too that the methane comes from plants, which in turn took CO2 from the air, unlike your auto which burns oil from the ground, which only returns on geological timescales).
Note 1: the high side would be around 160 percent of current emissions from domestic animals - in other words, less emissions today from wild and domestic animals.
Note 2: 61 is 70% of 87, the assumed emissions from domestic animals, which is 87 million tons of CO2 equivalent; total emissions in the U.S. were 6.8 billion tons in 2010 - so that is only 1.23 percent of total emissions from livestock methane; thus, if we just stopped raising animals on food crops (and stopped converting 40% of the corn crop into auto fuel, which should get first priority), we could drastically reduce emissions; driving a car (average per day) produces far more emissions that eating a hamburger.
As usual, my opinion on this subject has already been explained perfectly by Ron Swanson.
I call this “Turf and Turf”
