Many years ago I watched the documentary The Sorrow and the Pity about France during the German occupation during WW II in a movie theater. It’s a film that consists of people talking about their lives under the occupation from 1940 to 1944. Some collaborated, some joined the resistance, and some just tried to stay out of the way and thus stay alive. Only one interview in the four hour long film has stuck with me. A French farmer initially didn’t care one way or another about the Nazis or Vichy, as he figured that his life wouldn’t change very much one way or another with them in charge. Then meat was rationed, and the farmer wasn’t too happy about that since he was raising his own cattle but the government was seizing it. Then one day the farmer went to town and walked by a cafe and saw German soldiers eating meat, and that was the day he decided to join the resistance, the real resistance that operated in secret, and killed people and blew things up.

You could make the argument that the USA had meat rationing too during WW II, and there wasn’t much resistance to that, other than a thriving black market. Americans were willing to forgo some hamburgers and chicken dinners because all of them personally knew someone who was laying their life on the line in Europe or the Pacific fighting the Axis, and that meat was going to them. Cut people’s meat off over some theory, and expect them to act like that French farmer did.