At least in the U.S. taxation wouldn’t be needed for animal product prices to reflect their true costs.
Just remove the large government subsidies the animal product industry enjoys and let the free market raise the prices.
I doubt it would happen.
Those subsidies exist because the Nixon administration created them after Americans complained about high food prices. It would be political suicide to remove those subsidies, especially with inflation and price gouging disguised as inflation driving up food prices.
I agree with everything you said, but also it’d be super interesting to cancel the factory farming subsidies and see whole foods flourish. Theoretically this would raise the cost of burgers and lower the cost of vegetables and other healthy products.
I agree it’ll never happen, but it would probably move US closer to European diets.
European diet can be very much centered around meat too unfortunately, farmers also have a lot of power here. Guess it is still better than the US, but we are part of the problem too.
I agree that just stopping subsidies and let everything in the hands of market forces won’t do. We cannot juste expect things to work better in the current system, it would need many other forces and institutions to develop another type of agriculture and scale down meat production and consumption and make other products more affordable for everyone, it cannot come only from making meat a luxury good.
I don’t think produce would go down in price, just that their price would seems so much more appealing over non-subsidized meat.
Yah, it will never happen.
Kind of frustrating since you can see it fitting in with the “Tax me less, don’t use my tax money to subsidize someone else!” mentality.
That’s because the full version of that mentality is “Tax me less, don’t use my tax money to subsidize someone else, give that money to my company!” Instead
What’s aggrivating about addressing this problem is that the meat ans dairy industry’s propaganda has its tendrils so deep in the brains of most people that you can’t even broach the topic of addressing the impact of artificially cheap meat without triggering most people and causing them to shut down.
You can’t even suggest we should just eat less meat, let alone have a coherent conversation about changing the industry to make the price of meat properly reflect its real-world cost in resources.
In France, an ecological politician tried to talk about it recently, now she is receiving hundred of tweets of people taking pictures with huge pieces of meat, very proud of their own stupidity (including other politicians). I observe some changes around me though, in countries (home and host countries) where meat is still very important in the common diet, but far from being large and fast enough unfortunately…
It’s unfortunately become an identity thing, which is really sad because it means its one of those things that is just entrenched and nearly unreachable intellectually. That’s why people respond with dumb stuff like them eating an entire ham or whatever. In the US they’ve successfully tied the idea of eating meat to conservative concepts about masculinity, which is a pretty toxic combo.
