A New Study Suggests a Meat Tax Is Coming for Your Bacon

Crispy, salty bacon in a buttered bap. A beef roast on a cold Sunday afternoon. Greasy fried chicken at 1 AM. All delicious, and all incredibly bad for the environment and your health (soz).

If you somehow remain in doubt about the harmful effects of the meat industry, then new research from a British investment organisation could change your mind. Farm Animal Investment Risk and Return (FAIRR) today released a paper claiming that the introduction of a tax on meat is “increasingly probable,” due to the food’s impact on both the environment and our health.

FAIRR, which specialises in investment information for those managing over $4 trillion, claims that the implementation of the Paris agreement on climate—a global environmental pledge that Donald Trump recently threatened to leave—will lead to the taxation of meat. As the global meat industry contributes more carbon emissions than planes, cars, trains, and ships combined, reducing meat production is necessary in order to abide by the pledges of the agreement.

Saving the environment from our KFC habit isn’t the only incentive for a meat tax—also referred to as a “sin tax.” According to FAIRR, if protein derived from animals was entirely removed from our diets, then “more than $1 trillion could be saved in health and environmental costs by 2050.” The organisation reports that just like sugar, carbon, and tobacco before it, meat is to be on the list of harmful substances to become regulated. No surprise there, really, following the World Health Organisation’s 2015 branding of meat as a cause of cancer.

The FAIRR report also follows an initial 2014 study conducted by the University of Oxford that states that the environmental effects of meat could be offset by taxes. According to study authors from the Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food, a 40 percent tax on beef could be enough to compensate for the damage to the environment.

Jessica Almy, director of policy at The Good Food Institute, an organisation that funds plant-based meat research, told MUNCHIES that unless our meat production radically changes, the sin tax is welcome. She said: “The way meat is produced now is not sustainable in the long term. A tax on meat seems inevitable unless we shift toward producing meat in better ways.”

Lab-grown meat, Almy suggests, could be a solution: “Meat made from plants and clean meat, which is produced directly from cells without a need for industrial farms and slaughterhouses, has all the benefits of meat without posing risks to the environment.”

No matter how much you love those late night nuggets after a mad one, the research seems to be clear: meat really sucks.