I think you've missed my main point: reduced consumption is an increase in sustainability [1]. And it's not clear to me that grass-fed beef is sustainable [2] (especially not at the current scale of consumption [3])
Farmers are critical, underpaid, and deal with a lot of risk. There must be some insurance. But consumers should pay the real price for their goods at the counter.
I agree with you on most of your points including that grass-fed beef is not sustainable at the current rate of consumption, but that does not mean that it isn't sustainable at a lower rate of consumption / higher price.
On one hand I agree with what you're saying, biggest problem is that the price isn't fair, as it is subsidized, either by the government directly (corn subsidies, etc.) or by the damage to the environment and our health that we keep ignoring.
However you cannot introduce a tax on all produce, when clearly some practices are more sustainable than others. At the current rate of consumption, grass fed cattle might not be enough to satisfy the demand, but if a farm doesn't pollute the environment, then it does not deserve a tax.
In nature there's symbiosis in the food chain, there's symbiosis between predator, cattle and grass, with grass being evolved for grazing, which in turn helps to offset the CO2 emissions of the cattle consuming it, with predators playing an important role in trimming the herd, which would otherwise go out of control. This obviously doesn't have to be a zero-sum game and by the looks of it nature has been way more effective at converting sun's energy into organic matter than we have.
Surely meat is too cheap compared to what it actually costs to produce, but I fear that many people identify meat consumption as this big evil, but without identifying the source of the problem. The problem is with all industrial farming, because we've accelerated farming by burning fossil fuels, turning forests into corn fields and polluting everything in the process. Without cheap fossil fuels or government subsidies, industrial farming practices wouldn't be possible. And it's not sustainable because there is no symbiosis in anything we are doing.
And the other problem is over-population, with capitalism and poverty encouraging continuous growth. You now hear on the news that the population in Europe is aging, which should actually be a great piece of news, except that our current economic climate doesn't cope well with a diminished fertility rate, capitalism relies on constant growth, hence we actually rely on other nations remaining poor and producing imigrants ;-)
And we should be ending the global poverty, which I'm fairly certain that we can, which should flatten that growth curve, but we should also impose a maximum fertility rate of 2 and stop doing commerce with the countries that don't do that. Because we wouldn't need industrial-scale farming, if we wouldn't have 7 billion mouths to feed and Earth is limited.
Farmers are critical, underpaid, and deal with a lot of risk. There must be some insurance. But consumers should pay the real price for their goods at the counter.
1 - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/nov/07/tax-meat...
2 - http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/13/opinion/the-myth-of-sustai...
3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_meat_cons...
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