The other thing that gets missed in debates about vegetarianism is that it's not necessarily a binary thing. Just because you don't eat meat in some of your meals doesn't make you a vegetarian. There's a continuum between eating meat with every meal and never eating it.
This is most frequently missed when people bring up historical justifications for eating meat and cite that we're evolved to eat it. But that ignores that eating meat was, for most of human history, a rarity. For the majority of human history, we didn't have the tools necessary to hunt animals with weapons. Instead, we chased them on protracted persistence hunts that would last many hours, if not days. This made meat meals a once-in-a-while thing, not an every meal thing.
Too often, extremists on the vegetarian side advocate total meat abstinence and meat eaters think nothing of eating meat with every meal. And advocating meat abstinence works just about as well as advocating sex abstinence. People just aren't ready to give it up entirely. But many of the benefits of vegetarianism, both for the eater and the planet/animals, can be had by simply reducing meat consumption and eating vegetarian more often. Eating meat occasionally also simplifies a number of the malnutrition risks that can be a concern for people who are completely vegan.
I see policies like the one in this story being beneficial not because they're going to turn people into vegetarians, but because they're going to realize that they can have satisfying meals that don't include meat and maybe they'll make that choice a bit more often. No one has to become a vegetarian for this policy to be good.
This is most frequently missed when people bring up historical justifications for eating meat and cite that we're evolved to eat it. But that ignores that eating meat was, for most of human history, a rarity. For the majority of human history, we didn't have the tools necessary to hunt animals with weapons. Instead, we chased them on protracted persistence hunts that would last many hours, if not days. This made meat meals a once-in-a-while thing, not an every meal thing.
Too often, extremists on the vegetarian side advocate total meat abstinence and meat eaters think nothing of eating meat with every meal. And advocating meat abstinence works just about as well as advocating sex abstinence. People just aren't ready to give it up entirely. But many of the benefits of vegetarianism, both for the eater and the planet/animals, can be had by simply reducing meat consumption and eating vegetarian more often. Eating meat occasionally also simplifies a number of the malnutrition risks that can be a concern for people who are completely vegan.
I see policies like the one in this story being beneficial not because they're going to turn people into vegetarians, but because they're going to realize that they can have satisfying meals that don't include meat and maybe they'll make that choice a bit more often. No one has to become a vegetarian for this policy to be good.