As a counter to your story, I had one professor who required his students to purchase his own locally produced textbook, which had a new version with different exercises every semester or year, and I guess he made good money off of that because everybody thought he was an asshole for doing it, but he did it anyways.
I agree that individual change is important, but you have to go about it a certain way. Actually the way OP is phrasing it is pretty good. Let people understand that just eating less red meat is always better.
Because if the messaging is at all confusing, you’ll get the kind of result you got during the start of Covid with the masks. It was always true that any amount of masking helped, but when you started to make it complicated, you got a lot of backlash and people completely stopped masking. And of course, with both Covid and red meat, there are people out there incentivized to make things complicated so that people give up. I think it really needs to be dead simple to work.
My big problem is not with individuals ethically trying to do the right thing, or about people trying to convince individuals to be ethical and to do the right thing.
My big problem is the amount of effort in this when it will have only small gains. In today’s society, meaningful gains come from changes in government regulations and policies.
If you want people to stop eating as much red meat, get the government to stop providing subsidies to cattle owners. I have a money-focused relative who owns cattle only because of the subsidies. At least let the price of beef go up to its actual market value. You’d think that would be an easy sell for Republicans who believe in the free market, but they’re the ones who want the subsidy the most.
Of course, then, you can add additional regulations and encourage environmental responsibility.
I think it’s the heat that done them in. Sometimes, dishwashers have modes that don’t use a lot of heat, and I think it might also help to put heat sensitive things in the top rack. But even if you do that, I’m guessing that the kind of plastic that melts in the dishwasher probably won’t be safe to drink from, even if it doesn’t look like it melted.