Meatless Monday is a concept promoted by the nonprofit The Monday Campaigns in association with the Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health. It’s a really good idea but I do have one problem with it. But I’ll get to that in a minute.

The benefits of going meatless one day a week and decreasing your animal consumption by 15 percent are many. You can reduce your cancer risks, heart disease, fight diabetes and lower your carbon footprint.

These are good things.

The Web site for Meatless Monday talks about all of these benefits and lists hospitals, schools, universities and restaurants that are part of the initiative including Houston’s own Backstreet Cafe.

“We just thought it would be a good idea,” says chef Hugo Ortega. “I go to the Urban Harvest Farmers Market every weekend and buy fresh greens and vegetables for the restaurant so it just seemed like a good idea to offer a vegetable meal on Mondays. For our family we’ve always tried to emphasize fresh greens, vegetables and grains, those are my passions.”

Chef loves Swiss chard, squash, mushrooms and kale (although he also likes fish and shellfish) and he can do some incredible things with these ingredients like the Tuscan kale soup and his Knopp Branch roasted beet salad with carrots, endive, radish, crumbled bleu cheese, crushed hazelnuts and Haas satsuma vinaigrette.

For the Backstreet Monday special Ortega is doing a weekly changing three-course meal of veggies he’s sourced from the farmers market. The meal is $30 with $5 going to Urban Harvest. You can also order a la carte with a portion of the price also going to the nonprofit. Or you can order from the regular menu, which has plenty of dishes with meat.

Which makes it a little different from the Meatless Monday at Pondicheri.

Chef/owner Anita Jaisinghani, who also owns Indika, started Meatless Mondays about five weeks ago. And her first day didn’t go to well because on Mondays all her dishes are meatless. No. Meat. At. All.

“I had about 50 people walk out,” says the petite chef. “I was really surprised that some people were so upset about not being able to order meat. I was in the kitchen and my son was working the front. He came back and told me he had to stand up for me.”

She does serve eggs at breakfast on Mondays, but none of her great kema or savory samosas. No meat. Period.

“It’s not for everybody,” she says. “Last Monday we still had about 10 people walk out when they found out we weren’t serving any meat. But I’m definitely going to keep doing it. I’m making dishes I grew up with in India. It’s healthy and it’s good for the environment.”

I’m all for meatless days. I love meals of vegetable soup and artisan breads, fresh pasta with Swiss chard polenta and roasted root veggies. And when summer comes I’ll hit the farmers market for ingredients to make tomato and cucumber sandwiches and fruits and greens for salads. Yum. It really is easy to go meatless for an entire day.

Jaisinghani adds that when she was growing up they always had a meatless day once a week, usually on Tuesdays.

And that’s my problem with the Meatless Monday movement.

It’s on Monday. As in Montrose Mondays at El Real Tex-Mex.

Here’s the deal. If you live in the zip codes of 77006, 77019 or 77098 (and have a drivers license to prove it) you get half off all your food. That’s half off the wonderful chile con queso topped with spicy picadilla (meat). Half off the fabulous San Antonio-style puffy tacos stuffed with chicken. (More meat.) Half off the beef enchiladas and venison chili and posole. (Meat, meat, meat!)

And yes, you could order the new vegetarian chile rellenos stuffed with cheese (no meat) but come on. The beauty of eating at El Real is the meat. The beef, chicken and pork cooked into those retro Tex-Mex dishes and made with lard rendered on site from heritage pigs. Sigh. So delicious. Now, if they would just make those margaritas in the frosty beer mugs half price on Mondays…

So, OK, I can go meatless once, even twice a week.

Just don’t make it on Mondays.