New York Daily News Guest Columnist Peter Singer Advocates Meat Tax

A high tax on meat is needed for meat-eaters to consume less, ultimately resulting in multiple benefits to human health, animal welfare and the environment, writes Peter Singer, a Princeton University bioethics professor and author of Animal Liberation and co-author of The Ethics of What We Eat, in an October 25, 2009, guest column in the New York Daily News. He advocates a 50 percent tax on the retail value of meat, but “if it is not enough to bring about the change we need, then, like cigarette taxes, it will need to go higher.” Singer advocates a tax on all meat, fearing “a tax on red meat alone would merely push meat-eaters to chicken.”

Americans, Singer writes, have “been ignoring the cow in the room. That’s right, cow. We don’t eat elephants. But the reasons for a tax on beef and other meats are stronger than those for discouraging consumption of cigarettes, trans fats or sugary drinks.”

He suggests that a meat tax would (i) save lives because “red meat is likely to kill you”; (ii) discourage people from supporting cruelty to farm animals; (iii) decrease industrial meat production, which “wastes food” and puts “unnecessary pressure on our croplands and causes food prices to rise all over the world”; (iv) “be an important step toward cleaner rivers” because less livestock would result in less agricultural runoff from fertilizers used to grow the grain to feed the livestock; and (v) be a “highly effective way of reducing our greenhouse gas emissions and avoiding catastrophic climate change.”