How to contribute to our Meatless Monday feature

Meatless Monday has a long history with Johns Hopkins, and the weekly Meatless Monday on our IG account welcomes contributions from any Hopkins affiliate. That includes students, trainees, staff, faculty, and alumni. We love hearing about your favorite meals and the stories behind them! Here are the details of what to do.

1. Email us at wellbeing@jhu.edu to inquire about available dates. We usually plan out our calendar a few weeks in advance but there is some flexibility. We’re happy to try to accommodate your schedule. If you want to use Meatless Monday as an opportunity to promote a club or event, reach out sooner rather than later to determine availability. Generally, we must have all content on the Thursday before the intended publication date.
2. Once we have a date nailed down, make (or buy) a vegetarian dish. Dairy is OK if that’s part of your diet, but no meat or fish products*.
3. Take a nice picture (or two or three) of said dish. Video is good too; once we’ve settled on a date we can talk about specific details on specs.
4. Send those nice pictures (or videos) to us. We don’t need pictures to be “Instagram-worthy,” although we certainly welcome fun culinary and artistic choices if that’s your thing). We just want to see what you like to eat. Sometimes that’s high-res photographs of elaborated plated meals. Sometimes it’s an iPhone shot of a big ol dish of mac and cheese.
5. Along with those nice pictures (or videos), send us any info you’d like included (what is in the dish, tagging a recipe creator if need be) and perhaps a bit about your relationship with cooking and food and/or general well-being. Any thoughts about intersectionality and identity and nutrition are welcome! We will likely edit what you send us and get your sign-off on the final draft. If you have any events or clubs that you’d like to promote, we can probably tie that into the caption, especially if the dish itself is somehow relevant. (The “relevance” can be pretty loose, something like “Meal X reminds me of Y, did you know there’s a Y event this week.”)
6. If you want to include the recipe, that’s great but you don’t have to. If it’s a recipe that you did not create yourself, please let us know where it came from so we can give that person or publication credit.

*We will make VERY occasional exceptions to this rule if your dish is plant-forward and has a compelling story. Check out this post about Labor Day grilling from a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor (complete with a list of recipes) and this post from an Indigenous POV on what a “sustainable” diet really is.