The truth is not news: For personal health, for lives to be less threatened by changing climate, people must eat differently. How to do this is not debatable — more plants, fewer animals, less junk — yet those who profit from the status quo will fight those changes through marketing and obfuscation of facts.

Consider what happened with tobacco. It was thought to be dangerous in the ‘30s; it was proved to cause lung cancer in 1948; the surgeon general warned us in 1964; and then there was the 1998 states’ attorneys generals’ Master Settlement Agreement, which, among other things, limited the marketing of tobacco. This last was effective because it actually made it more difficult to smoke. For all the talk about industrial agriculture being a contributor to climate change, for all the talk about the dangers of ultra-processed foods, the reaction has largely been more talk and almost no action.

Counting on a couple of billion heavy meat-eaters to respond to someone’s eloquence and cut back their meat consumption by 90 percent (the recommended amount, to have real impact) is not a plan. It is, rather, a plea. In his chapter “Dispute With the Soul,” Foer blames “human nature.” Because of it, “people like me, who should care and should be motivated and should make big changes, find it almost impossible to make small sacrifices for profound future benefit.” The argument for individuals to eat better isn’t wrong, but it encourages “people like me” — wealthy people, almost all white — to become better shoppers while leaving others behind. Not everyone can make the same decisions.

Human nature is not the reason that our diet consists of large amounts of meat and junk food; availability, access and marketing determine that. For people to eat and act differently, different tools, beneficial rather than exploitative, must be employed. This is about supply, not demand. If cheeseburgers are everywhere, and always priced lower than health-enhancing meals, and we have been trained from birth to “enjoy” them, we will continue to eat cheeseburgers. The easiest way for us to eat fewer cheeseburgers is to produce fewer cheeseburgers, or at least to price them at their true cost, one that includes their contributions to climate change, public health, environmental degradation and so on. (This would make them prohibitively expensive.)

High-tech fake meat isn’t the answer, because even though vegan ultra-processed food doesn’t kill animals it kills people and furthers climate change. And, if you’re wanting to turn around the climate crisis, you have to go beyond food: If fossil fuels are widely available and cheap, and there aren’t better options, people will continue to drive and fly. Guilt-tripping isn’t a huge change-maker.

Bill McKibben’s 2016 New Republic article, “A World at War,” in which he urged us to treat the climate crisis as we did World War II, presents the soundest argument to date: Climate change is a crisis, and we need government to lead us in attacking it. We also need government to lead in attacking the food crisis: We need new laws and stronger enforcement of existing ones that will make it difficult or impossible for industrial animal production to remain profitable; we need to make it easy to buy food produced by sustainable, even regenerative farming; and we need to make it inexpensive for people to buy or be served that kind of food, perhaps in what amounts to communal kitchens — a different way of doing “fast food.” Generally, we need to limit exploitation — to tax and even break up the agribusinesses responsible for ecocide and the increasingly global epidemic of chronic disease — and we need to enhance cooperation.