Ideally, we would incentivize people to eat meat of their own accord, but that’s hard to do on a meal-plan without being able to control pricing. However, take meat off the menu and people might realize they can actually live without it.

Furthermore, we limit personal freedoms all the time in order to promote the public good. I’m all for individual liberties—up until the point where they begin to encroach on collective freedoms. For instance, I don’t believe that my personal freedom to buy a massive gas-guzzling SUV trumps the arguably greater freedom we all have to live in a world with clean air and a stable climate. In this analogy—clumsy as it is— Meat Free Monday would be something like Fuel Economy Standards, which almost everyone apart from auto-industry lobbyists accepts as a reasonable limit on our personal freedom.

Ultimately, Meat Free Monday is about a small change that can make a big difference. HUDS caters to a vocal minority of Meatarians who either refuse to see the wider environmental merits of reducing consumption for just one meal a week or simply don’t care. This article is dedicated to the less-meat majority. We are the 70 percent!

Oliver T. Kerr, GSAS ’13, is a graduate student in East Asian Studies.