It's a little hard to know what to say about London mayor Boris Johnson's aggressively stated position that getting human beings to eat less meat would be too hard, and so instead we should work to sharply reduce the number of living humans. Huh. Of course, Johnson's suggestions for depopulating earth is not to have UN workers go around castrating young males, but "female emancipation, education, [and] family planning." Similarly, no one is suggesting there should be international meat monitor forces stationed on street corners and prepared to arrest anyone who eats a cheeseburger. Rather, you try and make changes on the margins, educate people about the costs of a meat-heavy diet, make sure they have healthful and affordable vegetarian options, reduce subsidies that make beef artificially cheap, and so forth. You do what you can. Doctors tell people to eat less red meat all the time. If one of them stood up and blustered that that was insane and the doctor should focus on curing heart disease not nannying his diet and he was so offended that he was going to hold a series of "Homeric barbecues" full of "chops and sausages and burgers and chitterlings and chine and offal, and the fat will run down our chins, and the dripping will blaze on the charcoal, and the smoky vapours will rise to the heavens," the doctor would shrug and write the patient off as a dead man. Here we're dealing with the health of the planet rather than the health of a patient, but it's not terribly different.
