Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg An employee rings up a customer while others prepare orders at a Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. restaurant in Hollywood, California on Tuesday, July 16, 2013.

The American hunger for meat, especially beef, is abating for the first time in living memory. Now vegetables are claiming more space in an unexpected place: the fast food counter, with White Castle and Chipotle heavily promoting new vegan entrees.

The new options come as Washington and the United Nations are pushing plant-based diets to save the environment and lower health care costs. The restaurant chains, however, say theyre just answering consumer demand with new products, not letting bureaucrats lead them by the nose. White Castle introduced its vegan slider, made by Dr. Praegers Sensible Foods, on December 30. The product was trial tested over the summer in New York and New Jersey, White Castles second largest market after the Chicago area. Chipotle Mexican Grill, Inc. is promoting its new vegan organic tofu Sofrita burritos on Monday, January 26, by offering customers who buy it a free meal when they return with their receipts over the next month.

This is what we heard from customers, especially Millennial customers and potential customers, 18 to 24 years old,said Jamie Richardson, vice president of government and shareholder relations at White Castle System, Inc. They might have a range of reasons for wanting a vegan option, and they might not be vegan but have friends who are.

Food experts summoned by the Obama administration are wooing the same demographic. The committee charged with drafting the 2015 Dietary Guidelines for Americans (and the accompanying food pyramid graph recently redesigned as a plate) for the Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Department of Agriculture agreed to include a blurb about the environmental costs (and therefore future food security impact) of meat consumption. As reported by Science, the food sustainability and safety subcommittee chair, Tufts University professor of nutrition Miriam Nelson, PhD said, "Research shows that, with young adults, a green message can be a real motivating factor....It could be used as another messaging tool."

Congress balked at this new environmentalist inroad and demanded in its late December budget package that the Dietary Guidelines stick strictly to nutrition. The UNs Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported in November that eating less meat could slow global climate change, confirming earlier findings published in peer-reviewed science journals. Those papers prompted pronouncements against meat overindulgence by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon.

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The UN has a tough row to hoe. Where wealth increases, as in China and even India, meat consumption tends to follow. In many nations, agriculture is a bigger contributor to climate change than even transportation. The U.S. is, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the second largest per capita meat eating nation after Luxembourg. That said, Per capita meat consumption in the U.S. has stagnated in recent years and may be declining, noted Emily Cassidy, research analyst with the Environmental Working Group. Thats because omnivores have shifted to eating more vegetables. Vegetarians, who eat eggs and dairy but not meat, make up just 5% of the U.S. population, according to a 2012 Gallup poll, flat or slightly down from 1999. About 2% of Americans say theyre vegan, abstaining from all animal products.

Over 9 billion farm animals are slaughtered each year for meat, according to the Human Society. Americans eat nearly 271 pounds of meat per person annually, with chicken now surpassing beef for the first time in a century. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrations fisheries division reported in October that U.S. operators landed 9.9 billion pounds of fish and shellfish in a year, up 245 million pounds from just two years before.

If all Americans forego meat and dairy for one day a week, thats the equivalent of taking 7.6 million cars off the road for the year, said Cassidy of the Environmental Working Group. From 2001 to 2011, all agricultural greenhouse gas emissions were up 14%. Globally, livestock accounts for 18% of greenhouse gas emissions. Going vegan isnt the only way to reduce emissions -- the U.S. has already reduced its carbon footprint by eating chicken instead of beef.

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Vegan Options Invade Fast Food As Beef Consumption Sinks